Hunter S. Thompson
Early journalism career

After leaving the Air Force, Thompson worked as sports editor for a newspaper in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, before relocating to New York City. There he audited several courses at the Columbia University School of General Studies. During this time he worked briefly for Time as a copy boy for $51 a week. At work, he typed out parts of F. Scott Fitzgerald 's The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway 's A Farewell to Arms in order to learn the authors' rhythms and writing styles. In 1959, Time fired him for insubordination. Later that year, he worked as a reporter for The Middletown Daily Record in Middletown, New York. He was fired from this job after damaging an office candy machine and arguing with the owner of a local restaurant who happened to be an advertiser with the paper.

In 1960, Thompson moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to take a job with the sporting magazine El Sportivo, which ceased operations soon after his arrival. Thompson applied for a job with the Puerto Rican English-language daily The San Juan Star, but its managing editor, future novelist William J. Kennedy, turned him down. Nonetheless, the two became friends. After the demise of El Sportivo, Thompson worked as a stringer for the New York Herald Tribune and a few other stateside papers on Caribbean issues, with Kennedy working as his editor.

After returning to mainland United States in 1961, Thompson visited San Francisco and eventually lived in Big Sur, where he spent eight months as security guard and caretaker at Slates Hot Springs, just before it became the Esalen Institute. At the time, Big Sur was a Beat outpost and home of Henry Miller and the screenwriter Dennis Murphy, both of whom Thompson admired. During this period, he published his first magazine feature in Rogue about the artisan and bohemian culture of Big Sur and worked on The Rum Diary. He managed to publish one short story, "Burial at Sea," which also appeared in Rogue. It was his first piece of published fiction. The Rum Diary, based on Thompson's experiences in Puerto Rico, was finally published in 1998 and in 2011 was adapted as a motion picture. Paul Perry notes that Thompson exhibited extreme homophobia while at Big Sur, making violent threats to expel gay bathers from local hot springs.

In May 1962, Thompson traveled to South America for a year as a correspondent for the Dow Jones -owned weekly paper, the National Observer. In Brazil, he spent several months as a reporter for the Rio de Janeiro -based Brazil Herald, the country's only English-language daily. His longtime girlfriend Sandra Dawn Conklin (subsequently Sondi Wright) joined him in Rio. They married on May 19, 1963, shortly after returning to the United States, and lived briefly in Aspen, Colorado. Sandy was eight months pregnant when they relocated to Glen Ellen, California. Their son, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson, was born in March 1964. During the summer of that same year, Hunter began taking Dexedrine, which is what he would predominantly use for writing up until around 1974 when he began to write mostly under the influence of cocaine.

Thompson continued to write for the National Observer on an array of domestic subjects during the early 60s. One story told of his 1964 visit to Ketchum, Idaho, to investigate the reasons for Ernest Hemingway 's suicide. While there, he stole a pair of elk antlers hanging above the front door of Hemingway's cabin. Later that year, Thompson moved to San Francisco, where he attended the 1964 GOP Convention at the Cow Palace. Thompson severed his ties with the Observer after his editor refused to print his review of Tom Wolfe 's 1965 essay-collection The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. He later immersed himself in the drug and hippie culture taking root in the area, and soon began writing for the Berkeley underground paper Spider.
punctuation:no_comma, change_case:capital_word_frequency[3]