In a childhood marked by family tragedy (his father, an insurance agent, died when his son was 15, leaving the family broke), Thompson went off the rails in a big way. It was the subversive message of both books which hit home. While at high school in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1950s, he read and adored JP Donleavy's raucous novel The Ginger Man, and Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Nuances of its meaning - paranoia, self-absorption, anxiety, rage - made it Thompson's trademark. The phrase was used in his landmark book about Las Vegas in 1973, and repeatedly thereafter. Writing to a friend in November 1963, he used the phrase "fear and loathing" to describe how he felt at the assassination of President John F Kennedy. He broke every rule in the book, and was crowned in the New York Times as "our official crazy". Fantasies were every bit as useful a foundation for his articles as any sober fetish with "the facts". If the quotes he had to hand were boring, he made up new ones if the setting lacked somewhat in vividness, that, too, could be fixed. Unable, and unwilling, to work within the confines of any institution or periodical, it took Thompson a decade to find the distinctive voice that became one of the most strikingly original in American writing.
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