Hunter S. Thompson, who killed himself Sunday at age 67 at his “fortified compound” near Aspen, Colo., was the original gonzo journalist.

A solipsistic, thrill-seeking, drug and booze-addled skeptic, Thompson’s output declined in quality over the decades as he struggled to live up to his alter-ego, Raoul Duke, and his “fear and loathing” sagas. Yet even at his most repetitive and silly, Thompson never ceased to fascinate, if only for the train-wreck quality of his attempts to maintain a fever pitch, combining outrage with chemical intoxication.

There was a bright Thompson period, starting in 1966 when his book “Hell’s Angels” appeared on shelves. He had lived with the gang for a year, been beaten up, and knew whereof he spoke when he wrote, “To see a lone Angel screaming through traffic – defying all rules, limits, and patterns – is to understand the motorcycle as an instrument of anarchy, a tool of defiance and even a weapon. A Hell’s Angel on foot can look pretty foolish.”

At the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1967, he covered the emerging hippie movement, something he appears to have identified with more than he let on. The following year he was clubbed during riots while covering the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The experience convinced him that “we have to get into politics, if only in self-defense.” For his convention coverage, Thompson invented Raoul Duke: “The desperate scene outside seemed light-years away; only the plywood windows reminded those of us inside that the American Dream was clubbing itself to death just a few feet away. Duke was sitting with Susan at a table across from the bar.”

Then in 1970, Thompson ran for sheriff of Pitkin County on a “freak power” platform. He promised to rename Aspen “Fat City,” replace the streets with sod, and erect stocks to punish malefactors. Aspen, he said in a campaign ad, should “come to grips with the strange possibility that the next sheriff of this county may very well be a foulmouthed outlaw journalist with some very rude notions about lifestyles, law enforcement, and political reality in America.” He lost, and was as good as his word that he was finished with the “politics of the vote.”

Thompson maintained that he developed his gonzo voice as a matter of necessity when he was too intoxicated to write about the 1970 Kentucky Derby and instead submitted his stream-of-consciousness notes. (Oddly, Tom Wolfe tells a very similar story from 1962 about inventing “new journalism,” a vivid tendency that Thompson would also become identified with.) Acclaim was instant when the story ran in Scanlan’s.

“People [were] calling it a ‘great breakthrough in journalism,’ ” Thompson told Playboy in 1974. “And I thought, if I can write like this and get away with it, why should I keep trying to write like the New York Times? It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.”

“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” first published in 1971, will probably stand as Thompson’s most lasting contribution to American literature. Ostensibly the book is the record of a dual writing assignment to cover a motorcycle race and a convention of drug enforcement officers. On the surface, it is a comic ode to overindulgence in cocaine, ether, acid, and alcohol, greatly enhanced by grotesque Ralph Steadman illustrations. But more substantively, the book lies in an American tradition of seeking transcendence in the manner of Kerouac and Whitman, but through chemical means. The book’s immortal first sentence, narrated by Raoul Duke: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

Thompson began writing on politics for Rolling Stone, where he began a series of lively Nixon-thrashings that lasted the rest of Thompson’s life. Nixon was “that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character.” He was “America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde.” “The werewolf in us, the bully, the shyster. “The hostility did not abate. When Nixon died in 1994, Thompson wrote, “His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”

During the 1972 campaign, Thompson the writer seemed to interact meaningfully with the outside world for perhaps the last time in his career. Focusing mainly on the Democratic side of politics, he early identified McGovern as the candidate to watch. The gonzo and the real stood side by side, and the hallucinatory effect made for a remarkably successful treatment, even when he descended into fictional depictions of a South American doctor treating Edmund Muskie with an obscure hallucinogenic root called ibogaine. His articles were collected into “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.”

The drugs seemed to get the better of Thompson after that, and the ’70s saw him develop a reputation for writer’s block, outrageous expense accounts, and strange behavior. The missed assignments were not always his fault, as when he failed to file a story on the Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire because he contracted malaria. Thompson soon fell out with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, although the two seemingly reconciled in later years.

In 1979, Thompson published a collection of his magazine articles titled “The Great Shark Hunt.” In the introduction, he seemed to indicate he was striving for a new literary persona, and wrote that he had “finished the life I planned to live” so that “everything from now on will be a new life.” Sadly, the new life turned out rather like the old life, except with more firearms and famous friends, and fewer literary achievements.

Thompson, the son of an insurance agent, was raised in Louisville, Ky., and after graduating high school joined the Air Force. He worked as a sportswriter for a serviceman’s publication and was honorably discharged, two years early, for his “rebellious disregard for military dress and authority,” according to Current Biography. Thompson began writing fiction and supporting himself as a journalist. He worked briefly for newspapers and Time magazine, and then for a bowling magazine in Puerto Rico. In the early 1960s, he filed dispatches to the National Observer from South America on Indian life, tin mining, and jungle bandits. Returning to America, he continued to write fiction without much success; an early novel, “The Rum Diary,” was finally published in 1998. His journalism found more of a following, and after he published an article on Hell’s Angels in the Nation in 1965, he had his first book contract.

By the 1980s, Thompson had cemented his public persona – the shaved cranium, cigarette holder, outrageous behavior, and outrageous statements. “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me,” was one oft quoted gem. Another: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” He began making lecture and debate appearances, sometimes pitted against G. Gordon Liddy. Although Thompson professed to hate it, he was the inspiration for the Uncle Duke character in “Doonesbury.”

Thompson’s behavior grew odder, and mysterious explosions were sometimes heard emanating from his property. Tales of outrageous behavior – blowing up a jeep, consuming mass quantities of stimulants – became a standard part of every profile written about him. In 1990, he was put on trial for possession of explosives and narcotics, and for sexual assault, but the charges were eventually dropped. In 2000, he accidentally shot his assistant while going after a bear that had wandered onto his property.

In recent years, Thompson wrote rambling essays on sports that were spiked with liberal and libertarian politics for ESPN.com. The old gonzo magic occasionally surfaced, as in his last column, filed last week, proposing a new sport: shotgun golf. The game takes two players: one to drive the golf ball, the other to shoot at it.

Thompson had suffered from cancer, but he appeared to have beaten it. He underwent spinal surgery in 2004, but sounded chipper to friends. A statement released Sunday by his family said that “Thompson took his life with a gunshot to the head at his fortified compound,” without stating a reason. The statement continued, “He stomped terra.”

Hunter Stockton Thompson

Born July 18, 1939, in Louisville, Ky.; died February 20 at home in Woody Creek, Co.; survived by his son, Juan, a grandson, and his second wife, Anita Beymunk, his longtime assistant whom he married two years ago.