To anyone familiar with his writing, Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide probably wasn’t a big shock, but his drug-addled, gloom-filled prose was some of the best writing done in America in the last hundred years. “He was also what you get when you combine Murphy’s Law and some hillbilly Calvinist preaching the doctrine of innate depravity. He believed every man had it in him to do wrong… He spoke in bursts of words that later in his life became so unintelligible that a documentary about him provided subtitles. He had a sharp eye for the right people and he hung out with them. He had charisma. Being around him gave you the charmed but unsettled feeling of having joined an entourage.”