Up: [[Story]] Created: 2022-12-25 Gonzo is what a friend called Hunter S. Thompson’s way of writing. It means subjective writing by a journalist; writing where the journalist is participant rather than observer. But it’s more than that. Gonzo means *crazy, eccentric, bizarre*. Interestingly, the definition of gonzo came **from** Thompson’s label, not the other way around. Random House put the term in their dictionary during Thompson’s lifetime. There were journalists before Thompson who were participants in their stories — George Plimpton, Gay Talese. But it was Thompson who took it into crazy territory. He went to cover the [Kentucky Derby](https://www.openculture.com/2017/05/how-hunter-s-thompson-gave-birth-to-gonzo-journalism.html) in 1970, instructed by the editor to focus on the crowd rather than the horses or the scoreboard, and told to go as crazy as he wanted to. And he did. He was a crazy man —alcohol, drugs, an intense and possibly insane personality. His writing was a mix of unknown percentages of fact and fantasy. Sean Penn, the actor, said that where other writers would write about the green grass in a baseball stadium, Thompson would shove the grass up your nose and ask you if you could taste it at the back of your throat. The first example of Gonzo journalism was Hunter’s 1970 article *The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved* for *Scanlan’s Monthly*. He missed the deadline for the article, didn’t have a coherent story, ended up sending in pages from his notebook. I wonder about the difference between gonzo journalism and the ‘new journalism’ of Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and others who participate in what they write. Both camps make extensive use of metaphor, dialogue, and other story characteristics like foreshadowing. Both attempt to make the reader feel as if they were there. It looks like the big difference between the two is simply one of degree — Thompson took it furthest, went craziest. **Note**: I researched Gonzo journalism because of a dream.