Hunter S Thompson takes his final trip

He was somewhere around Woody Creek when the drugs began to take hold. Or perhaps it was Barstow, or the Kentucky Derby, or on the campaign trail with George McGovern, who the hell cares, there's been an awful lot of cocaine under the bridge since then. The shopping list for Las Vegas went something like this: two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... and that was for just one trip.

Occasionally Hunter S Thompson got off his head - remember the sky full of bats in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas? you think he just made those up, for Christ's sake? - but mostly he was just being a reporter, a very special kind of reporter.

Not that he seemed to have much time for journalists. In Fear And Loathing he said: "The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or trade. It is a cheap catch-all for f***offs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector." And sometimes when they came to visit him in Colorado, trying to see if they could match him whisky for whisky, margarita for margarita, line for line, he would shoot at them for fun.

Journalists had a lot of time for him, though. He changed the landscape, ripping up the rulebook, riding through the old ways in a supercharged candy red Chevy convertible of rushing, visceral, vomitflecked prose. The hired swine, the deadbeat no-hopers and faggots and geeks of the mainstream press jumped out of the way, wild-eyed with terror.

Gonzo journalism, he called it, but who the hell was Gonzo? Or what? According to the Dictionary of American Slang, it is street-speak for anything wild, bizarre or confused, although there are those who reckon it is an Irish-American term for the last man standing after a long drinking session. And Thompson was always the last man standing.

It started off sanely enough. Middle-class upbringing in Louisville, Kentucky, then things got a bit shaky when Hunter S Thompson - the S stood for Stockton - was jailed for his part in a robbery at 18. After that the Air Force, working as a sports editor, then down to Puerto Rico to be a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. His breakthrough came in 1965 with an article about Hell's Angels which was turned into a criticallyacclaimed book. In the blurb he got the myth off to a fine start with this description of himself: "an avid reader, a relentless drinker and a fine hand with a .44 Magnum".

His masterpiece was 1972's Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, adapted from a two-part article written for Rolling Stone magazine, chronicling his drug-fuelled adventures while ostensibly covering a motorcycle race in the desert.

That was fiction, more or less - wasn't it? - but a piece like The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved summed up the essence of gonzo journalism, as practised by Dr Thompson: several thousand words, four sentences on the race itself, the rest a bumping rollercoaster ride of margaritas, whiskys, Marlboros, evil fantasies about the Black Panthers, drugs, mint juleps, more drugs and the shaking, ravaged figure of Ralph Steadman, the British cartoonist who accompanied him. Through all the madness and chaos, a weird kind of truth came through, and noone who read could ever look at the Kentucky Derby in the same light ever again.

Thompson also changed political writing for ever. One of his most important works was Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72, his take on the presidential race. He described Nixon and his family as "America's answer to the monstrous Mr Hyde. He speaks for the werewolf in us". On Hubert Humphrey: "There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until you've followed him around for a while."

Whatever else happened to Thompson - and his later efforts were certainly not enthusiastically received - he never gave up on his old hatreds. In an essay written as an obituary for Nixon, at a time when other commentators were offering more generous reassessments of his legacy, Thompson called him: "A liar, a quitter and a bastard. A cheap crook and a merciless war criminal."

His targets were not just the familiar hate figures of Republican politicians. Of US rock and roll he said: "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench. A long plastic hallway where pimps and thieves run free and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side."

It was no surprise that a gun should have played a part in his death: he had a large collection of weapons, and the only surprise was that no-one else died first.

In 2000 he accidentally shot and slightly wounded his assistant, Deborah Fuller, trying to chase a bear off his compound at Woody Creek where he kept prized peacocks. When British journalist Robert Yates went to visit him at his lair they went hunting for a bobcat: when they could not find it, Thompson had a better idea: "Let's get the Limey instead!"

He left a wife Anita, son Juan and grandson William, a medium-sized armoury of guns and explosives and the small quantity of drugs he did not manage to take with him.