David Foster Wallace on Hunter S. Thompson

David Foster Wallace and Hunter S. Thompson are both iconic American fiction and non-fiction writers with massive audiences. But, how did Wallace feel about Thompson? Well, today I am going to sort through some BEEF between the two and try to figure out if Wallace's statements are projections or facts!
Discover over 100 of David Foster Wallace's favorite books and the three books he wrote with by his side below
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[@liammcooper]

I think he's missing the point. Mid-20th century saw a revolution in rhetoric, with works by Burke, Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Perelman which re-focused the entire paradigm around the audience rather than the speaker. So while it's ostensibly from Hunter S. Thompson's perspective, the intention is that he's the "everyman" giving a perspective that's so close to the action that it begins to move internally toward psychology and dreamlike fantasy. All the people Wallace listed are firmly Aristotelian; that's probably also why he preferred "Hell's Angels" as it's the most traditional of Thompson's journalistic work. The New Journalists, while arguably "narcissistic" (which I think is rich coming from someone like DFW who makes their reader spend inordinate amount of time on dense prolixy prose) is instead "subjective" with the intention of revealing more through narrative storytelling rather than traditional methods of non-fiction. It's somewhat ironic he prefers Swift, when Thompson is firmly entrenched in that tradition from Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, to Twain, of comic writers who exposed societal ills through the use of grotesque exaggeration, picaresque satire, and experimentation with 1st-person unreliable narrators (Pantagruel, Gulliver, Tristram etc).

[@MrUndersolo]

I love your comment!

[@Focaminante]

@@MrUndersoloMe too.

[@Ernesto_the_Caffiend]

Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is most entertaining book ever written

[@geordiejones5618]

Way better than Infinite Jest. I really like the short fiction of DFW but my god his longer work bores me to tears.

[@0andy1w]

HST is to literature as Bill Hicks is to comedy.

[@cantthinkofagoodname7923]

What does this mean?

[@brandonkindt1205]

Thompson also expressed regrets about his fame. He stated that his public persona had become too big and he'd either have to start over or kill off the persona. The difference between Thompson and Wolfe was the Thompson lived his stories. He embedded with the Hell's Angels. He ran for political office and went on a myriad of drug fueled adventures. Wolfe, on the other wrote about other people's adventures. In the case of Electric Kool-aid, he wrote about another famous author Ken Kesey. Kesey, a friend of Thompson had basically given up writing, so that like Hunter and his Beat predecessors, he could live his art.

[@WriteConscious]

Great comment! But, one of my professors was friends with Kesey, and he told him that he quit writing because he took so many drugs he lost the ability to make metaphors in stories. He was still trying to write for decades after he stopped publishing but couldn't produce anything good.

[@brandonkindt1205]

@@WriteConscious Some truth in all of it. Wolfe detailed how Kesey became more and more immersed in LSD. Kesey didn't totally stop writing but he'd never produced a great novel again. However the later short stories in Demon Box (where HST has a cameo) had some gems full of nuance and metaphor. An overarching theme of these stories was his questioning of the whole LSD, hippy movement - had it done any good or just made him a burn-out. The Day the Superman Died, a story about Neil Cassady, the speed munching driver of the tie-tyed LSD bus that Wolfe wrote about, probably best encapsulates Kesey's self-searching.

[@arcadianguitars3936]

Yep, unfortunately he felt he had to live up to his myth, and personally, I think this is what drove him to end his own life...like his hero Hemingway. He ran of juice, and I'm sure the amount of booze and drugs got the better of him. Having said that, I thought some of his journalism, Great Shark Hunt etc, was pretty good. Shame, I think if he had cleaned up and stood back and taken a good look, he could've been a great essayist of American culture.

[@dereksupernaut]

as a psychedelic myself Thompson in "Las Vegas" looking back to The High Water Mark of 1967 San Francisco is my my favorite passage ive ever read, Johnny Depp does a reading of it... Wallace looks like a Lesbian Pro Wrestler... LSD & Marijuana, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, & Pink Floyd were all rockin' & rollin' making the world a better place... fax!!!

[@written12]

Lesbian pro wrestler? Maybe a lesbian tennis player. Actually, with the shamte on his head, he looks like a lot of 80s young American men(who played tennis)

[@crud420]

acid casualty fingers typed this comment

[@dereksupernaut]

what do you mean you gave zero detail... are you dumb??? i am intelligent with a commoners personality so i spend my time with dumb folk and are rather familiar with their tendencies... dumb people love generic insults, i loved the music before the drugs the first led me to the second a concept perhaps too complex for your dumb mind... if you are not dumb, The Beatles were a very good band, then they started smoking Marijuana before the Rubber Sould album and John Lennon unleashed "In My Life" and "Norwegian Wood" on the world both as good as a song can get THEN the fellas started taking LSD and gave us Revolver/StrawberryFieldsForever and the world is clearly better going foward... if you love traditional pop songs AND experimental music; Syd Barrett is as good as John Lennon or anyone else as a singer/songwriter... fax!!!

[@Misserbi]

When I discovered HST did heroin it explained everything for me. Before I could not understand why he acted like the outcaste. You can compare him to the guitarist of the Rolling Stones. He is a dinosaur. He survived the purity of a slew of narcotics and was still able to come back to life. Not many drug users can tell their story and be successful. I think that is what draws new readers to him. It is miraculous what he has survived.

[@mr.newmanthadreamer8434]

He got me fucked up on that one. I love Hunter Thompson and Fear and Loathing

[@WriteConscious]

lol!

[@andrewgirvan3540]

I feel Thompson is more of an everyman than people are led to believe. His behavior and persona really are emblematic of the times and culture that working class men lived. This was enticing reading for the literate class looking to get a glimpse of this last gasp of heroic masculinity. They were whooping it up and cutting loose as a rebellion to the prospect of pointless death that the war God demands of young men. Thompson spent much energy railing against the Nixon regime. He was an activist in his own way, running for the position of Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado. You had to beat the swine at their own game! I've listened to firsthand stories of the bar scenes in western oilfield towns. The cowboy boots and regular fist fights with anyone who needed a good thumping. Riding around with the baddest fastest bikes of the day!Thompsons stories were wild but my man, the shit that went down outside of the narrow view of journalism and Hollywood would boggle many minds. I admit I tired of his sensationalized political writings. He wanted to wake people the fuck up and if it took scaring the shit out of people by firing a revolver into the air well thats what it took. I take issue with the accusation of creating a cult of personality. Thats feel thats lazy and you can accuse anyone of it just by pointing out their personal habits, dress, and mannerisms. You can't accuse someone of that when they booze, smoke, and snort that lifestyle as readily as most breath air, are bipedal and require water. The man wanted to live!

[@RyanLisbon]

Tom Wolfe? Bonfire of the Vanities might be the novel of the 80's. And A Man in Full is equally extraordinary. Give them a try.

[@johnnymisbegotten]

HST was a rock&roll, tongue-in-check journalist, not a fiction writer. He barely finished his only novel during his drug fueled lifetime. TW was a journalist-fiction blending style trending writer. HST was better at doing crazy things while TW was better at writing about other people doing crazy things. Both were fine writers.

[@countdublevay7327]

Dang. im liking this Wallace fellow more and more.

[@andergrindstudios7546]

what's your take on the Joan Didion school, and Brett Easton Ellis.. the Noir folks, Harry Crews and Capote.. (next four pods..).. ; )

[@canonrivette]

There is that old truism that one should always ignore the man or woman and concentrate on the writing, the Work. But how do you, as a great fan of David Foster Wallace, get past the bandana? I've always found a bandana, not just on his head, but in his prose.

[@dethkon]

“You are truly not in Dasein unless you subscribe to this channel!” Well I have to at least give you points for creativity, LOL

[@WriteConscious]

That's some fire right there. If you want to see me face-plant with a Dasein joke with the old president of the Phenomology Society, check out the first two or so minutes of this video lol. It was the first interview I ever did and I had no idea what to do 🤣 kzbin.info/www/bejne/h3O9Z2uhjr2UrNk

[@dethkon]

@@WriteConscious OK, I’ll check it out. I’ve never done an interview, but I believe that traditionally the job of the interviewer is to ask questions to the interviewee. I hope this helps! Lol

[@MrUndersolo]

Not a big Wolfe fan (too many !!!!), but I still give early Hunter a pass. Some of his nonfiction and coverage of Nixon's downfall are still pungent and entertaining. And he never bored me...as long as he stayed with politics.

[@brandonkindt1205]

Page for page, Thompson wrote mainly about the daily skirmishes of political figures, making most of his works inaccessible to a younger generation.

[@writeralbertlanier3434]

I don't agree with David Foster Wallace here. To begin with Wallace was a novelist and his view of Thompson who was primarily a journalist and non-fiction writer strikes me as literary criticism that has no bearing on journalism. Wolfe was a journalist who became a novelist so Wallace could make a valid critique of this work. The reality is that Thompson and Wolfe were writers w h o were distinctive a n d writing digressive and anti-conventional prose in their magazine articles. In essence they were doing pieces that were a transgression of journalistic form and structure. Wallace doesn't want to seem to deal with this other than to dismiss them.

[@tonylong525]

I was an editor in San Francisco when Thompson wrote (briefly) for our newspaper. He was completely unprofessional. He continually missed deadline, didn't give a damn, and it got so bad we had to dispatch an editor to Colorado to massage his ego and get him to file his copy. Narcissist? Self-promoter? Big time. Good writer? An acquired taste, I guess.

[@janhenkel4459]

DFW always did like that joke about J. Lewis and the French.

[@MrUndersolo]

Had to be said.

[@paulfroelich1024]

HST is very entertaining, but the self-indulgence is over the top. It leads to nothing whatsoever..."Decadent nihlism", that's perfect.

[@TheGoodMD]

That first quote was a fucking bombshell. He’s not wrong. F&L:LV was a fun read but when you think about Thompson’s schtick, it becomes very depressing. He wasn’t very good at fiction. What he did well was tell a good story. Poor guy. RIP Tommy Boy

[@tresjordan982]

IMHO ….HST, Kerouac , Bukowski, Kesey etc, are just cult of personality authors…. Wolfe is the real deal!!

[@jtrealfunny]

Just starting. Never managed to read HST, I tried a little. I'm hearing the opening and I totally agree; performative, why might I care about your zany escapades? I feel the same way about Jack Kerouac. It's only cool if you want to identify with the things they're talking about. Tom Waits, same thing. I think Wolfe (more reporter or correspondent than novelist imo) was much better but I haven't read him in years.

[@TheGoodMD]

I’ve been shitting on Kerouac since I first read him. Glad someone else feels how I feel.

[@written12]

Did Hunter S Thompson even write fiction? Thompson was a kind of exhibitionist on the page and the ‘act’ gets tiresome.