Anita Thompson finds Gonzo echoes of Hunter at Columbia

Jeff Kass, Rocky Mountain News

Published November 1, 2006 at midnight

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The home of late writer Hunter S. Thompson outside Aspen has been likened to a European salon, albeit one fortified with guns, whiskey and peacocks.

One recent afternoon, his widow could be found wandering through a new, more sedate setting: the Butler Stacks library area at Columbia University.

At 34, Thompson's second wife, Anita Thompson, has returned to college in New York City to pursue a bachelor's degree in American Studies.

"Vast. Serious. Challenging. Exciting. Grounding," is how Thompson, speaking by phone, describes the experience. "I just started to have fun recently. I was terrified of failure."

Thompson previously racked up class credits at Colorado State University in Fort Collins (her hometown) and the University of California, Los Angeles.

But around 1995 she took a ski break from academics in Aspen that ended up lasting 10 years. While in Aspen, she met Hunter Thompson, worked as his assistant, and married him in 2003. Thompson shot himself dead last year.

While working as a copy boy at Time magazine, Hunter Thompson took classes at Columbia in 1958, but did not leave with a degree. He went on to establish his own writing style and to publish a number of classics, including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

A recollection of Thompson's time in New York can be found in his first book of collected letters, The Proud Highway.

"The [Columbia] classes, 'Literary Style & Structure,' and 'Short Story Writing,' should give me a boost along the road to becoming another D.H. Lawrence," Thompson wrote to his Louisville, Ky., high school English teacher. "And the minute salary attached to the [Time] job, coupled with the terrifying tuition at Columbia, will undoubtedly keep me mired in abject poverty for the duration of my stay in Manhattan."

Hunter Thompson's stint at Columbia was a factor in Anita applying. She says he spoke "highly" and "fondly" of his time there.

Columbia's status as one of the country's top universities and its program for non-traditional students such as herself also attracted Anita Thompson.

Her classes this semester are Post-1945 American Literature, Dynamics of American Politics, Freedom of Speech and Press, and Evaluation of Evidence. (She was expecting to read her ex-husband's work in the literature class, but that is not on the syllabus, she said.)

Anita Thompson is the type of student who herself is working on books. She is writing The Gonzo Way, a Hunter Thompson guide to living, expected out in March, she said. She is also assisting historian Douglas Brinkley, Thompson's official biographer, on Hunter Thompson's third book of collected letters, The Mutineer.

Yet it has been difficult for Anita Thompson to get into the rhythm of university life surrounded by people almost half her age in a city that is mostly the polar opposite of her rural, Woody Creek home.

But a change occurred in just the past week, she recounts in owlfarmblog.com.

"As I sit here at my desk tonight, overlooking my Gotham neighborhood, I can still choose to hear the distant sounds of horns, dogs and helicopters (tuning in at this moment, I hear many cars, a garbage truck, now a horn, siren in the distance, another horn, hallway door slamming, motorcycle, brakes, quiet, two men laughing on the street below, now a diesel truck, siren getting closer, now a plane in addition to the helicopter) it goes on and on," Anita Thompson wrote at the end of October.

"It was just a few days ago that I realized for the first time, that the noise didn't bother me anymore."

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