![]() ![]() Journalism paid the bills, but it made him too famous and he’d drifted from his original plan, to be a serious man of letters. Being a novelist had always been his goal. In Key West, he wrote two screen treatments (unproduced) and attempted another novel. ![]() By the time he landed in Key West, he was fleeing suffocating celebrity, an ugly divorce, and a massive case of cocaine-induced writer’s block. Journalism was his quick buck to support his fiction habit. Those were Hemingway’s streets, and by the time Thompson arrived, the little island was thick with “New Hemingways,” including novelists Thomas McGuane and Jim Harrison.īy then, of course, Thompson was famous, but not as the novelist he’d wanted to be. He also sought Hemingway-esque adventure in the tropics, first in Puerto Rico in 1960, then in South America as a National Observer correspondent, and finally, at the end of the '70s, in Key West. He taught himself to write by serving as phantom stenographer to the literary he-man. He wanted to understand the rhythm of language, and feel those words traveling through his body. Young Thompson was so determined to be the Next Hemingway that he spent his cubicle hours as a Time magazine copy boy retyping The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, not changing a word. ![]() He wanted to be like Papa when he grew up-novelist, sportsman, womanizer, and legend in his own time. Thompson had a man crush on Ernest Hemingway. Like many young writers of his generation, Hunter S. ![]()
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