Hunter S. Thompson, who killed himself last week in his house in Woody Creek, near Aspen, Colorado, was a high-strung, thin-skinned, programmatically dissipated workaholic, inveterately suspicious of authority, perpetually worried that his best days were behind him, and unable to deal with the attention and success that he scrambled and sweated for many years to achieve. In other words, he was a magazine writer. And although the drugs and the guns and the whole paranoid “gonzo” routine long ago became tiresome and embarrassing—they were pretty embarrassing from the start, actually—the news of his death hit a nerve. He was one of the last of the true believers.

There is a lot of edge in the Thompson style, and this gets him compared with people like Lenny Bruce and H. L. Mencken, indignant savagers of bourgeois self-satisfaction. He also seems, by virtue of the “outlaw” accoutrements, to belong to the tradition in American writing that includes William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Henry Miller. But his true model and hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He used to type out pages from “The Great Gatsby,” just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald’s novel was continually on his mind while he was working on “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which was published, after a prolonged and agonizing compositional nightmare, in 1972. That book was supposed to be called “The Death of the American Dream,” a portentous age-of-Aquarius cliché that won Thompson a nice advance but that he naturally came to consider, as he sat wretchedly before his typewriter night after night, a millstone around his neck. Still, it pleased him to remember that Fitzgerald had once thought of calling “Gatsby” “The Death of the Red White and Blue.”

Thompson emerged on the scene in the late nineteen-sixties. His first book, on the Hell’s Angels (which originated as an article in The Nation in 1965), was published in 1967, when he was thirty, after a career path in journalism that resembled a trip through a pinball machine. The book brought Thompson to the attention of the mainstream press, and he was quick to squander the opportunity. Commissioned by Playboy to produce a profile of the Olympic skier Jean-Claude Killy, he handed in a lengthy piece in which he suggested that, “on balance, it seems unfair to dismiss him as a witless greedhead, despite all the evidence.” Playboy killed it. “This is our last adventure with H. Thompson,” one editor wrote. But Thompson found a home in what used to be called the alternative media—Ramparts, Scanlan’s Monthly (which bought the Killy profile), and Rolling Stone. It was in Scanlan’s that, in 1970, he published “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” and gonzo journalism was born.

Gonzo was a late flower on the shrub that was the New Journalism, the literary and (often) first-person style of reportage associated with magazines such as Harold Hayes’s Esquire and Willie Morris’s Harper’s, and with writers such as Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Joan Didion, all of whom were well established by 1970. The obsession with violence and chemically induced dementia in Thompson’s writing gave it a kind of post-Altamont, Manson-family, death-of-the-sixties aura, and made him a favorite not of the protest marchers and flower children of the sixties but of the youth of the burned-out decade that followed. In fact, Thompson despised the Hell’s Angels—he calls them “mutants” and “losers” in his book—and he had little patience for the hippies, either. His heart was in a lost world—the world of the Haight-Ashbury in 1964, San Francisco before the hippies and the hustlers and the media discovered it and ruined it. By 1966, he thought, that world was dead, and the rest of his career was a kind of bitter elegy for it. It was, forever, his lost paradise, the green light at the end of the dock. The pill-popping gun enthusiast of Woody Creek was a romantic to the last degree.

“To live outside the law, you must be honest.” Thompson, like a lot of people in the sixties and seventies, interpreted Dylan’s famous apothegm to mean that in order to be honest you must live outside the law. By the time the fallacy in this reading became obvious, his persona, thanks in part to the Uncle Duke figure in Garry Trudeau’s comic strip, but largely because of his own efforts, was engraved in pop-culture stone. It’s an occupational hazard: if you construct a career raging against the system, you can’t stop raging just because the system has accepted you, or has ceased to care or to pay attention. The anger needs someplace to go. At its best, in the Nixon era, Thompson’s anger, in writing, was a beautiful thing, fearless and funny and, after all, not wrong about the shabbiness and hypocrisy of American officialdom. It belonged to a time when journalists believed that fearlessness and humor and honesty could make a difference; and it’s sad to be reminded that the time in which such a faith was possible has probably passed.