Typescript Letter Signed Friend Paul by Thompson Hunter (2 results)

1 p. 4to. Condition: General toning, otherwise fine. 1 p. 4to. Thompson writes to his friend Paul Semonin, fellow Louisvillian, and member of the Athenaeum Literary Association. Semonin went to Yale and kept in touch with the younger Thompson via letters. In the early 1960s, Semonin would tag along with Thompson in the Caribbean, while Thompson was working on the manuscript of what would become The Rum Diary, and was marooned in Bermuda with him for a time. Thompson is writing from his home in Louisville, where he returned for a few months after working for Time Magazine in New York. He starts the letter with quotations from and allusions to Dylan Thomas, which he calls "the hairy part of my letter," before listing all that he was up to, including reaching out to William Styron for the name of his agent, and receiving an "excellent" letter in return, and his first correspondence with his future editor, and later friend, William Kennedy: "have been requested to do article on 'The Dry Rot of American Journalism,' (my title) for new paper in Puerto Rico---after threatening in an earlier letter to kick the editor's teeth in and ram a bronze plaque far into his small intestine.; life is good today, but tomorrow is a black and threatening mass of poverty and terror." A great letter, full of teasing and bragging and harping to a familiar, in search of what would become the immortal Hunter S. Thompson voice.

1 p. 4to. 1 p. 4to. Thompson writes to his friend Paul Semonin in Senegal, fellow Louisvillian, and member of the Athenaeum Literary Association. Semonin went to Yale and kept in touch with the younger Thompson via letters. In the early 1960s, Semonin would tag along with Thompson in the Caribbean, while Thompson was working on the manuscript of what would become The Rum Diary, and was marooned in Bermuda with him for a time. Thompson writes this letter from his infamous address at 318 Parnassus Avenue in San Francisco, which features heavily in his book Hell's Angels. It was there that he was living with his wife when he took the assignment from Carey McWilliams at The Nation to write an article about motorcycle gangs, and there that he counter-threatened the Angels with a shotgun hanging on his wall. The letter is written in response to a piece of "Africa commentary" that Semonin had sent to McWilliams at the Nation, which was turned down due to it's length of sixty-five pages: "I assume it had merit. If not, Carey would not have mentioned it; he's that way.65 pages is suicide." Thompson then goes on to describe the personal transformations that he's gone through since he was last with Semonin (maybe in the Caribbean): "I warm [sic.] you that you are going to find me a much tougher and shittier person than the one you left in Louisville 2 years ago. I have the score now and it don't make me happy. It has finally come home to me that I am not going to be either the Fitzgerald or the Hemingway of this generation -- and for a while I was a little nervous out on my own limb. I am going to be the Thompson of this generation, and that makes me more nervous than anything else I can think of." Old folds, rubbing along the edges, uneven edge from being torn open.