[New York: Macmillan, 1991]
This was the first book on Hunter and I’ve gotten weekly requests for it most of two decades. You can put it online for over a hundred bucks, but it is long out of print. Writing Outlaw Journalist was a pleasure, because it many ways it allowed me to update and correct this earlier book, as well as create something new. Hunter apparently liked this book, which means a lot to me. He wrote me a note: “McKeen, you shit-eating freak. I warned you not to write that vicious trash about me. Now you’d better get fitted for a black eyepatch in case one of yours gets gouged out by a bushy-haired stranger in a dimly-lit parking lot. How fast can you learn Braille? You are scum. HST.” His assistant translated the letter for me: “That’s just his way of saying that he liked it.” During the time I worked on Outlaw Journalist, I learned that Hunter used my interview questions to jump-start him on writing sections of Songs of the Doomed. He reprinted portions of the interview in Kingdom of Fear and the whole thing is available in Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson, edited by Beef Torrey and Kevin Simonson.