“Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson”

“Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson,” by William McKeen (W.W. Norton & Co., $27.95)

Through his published works and deeds, outlaw journalist Hunter S. Thompson built a towering myth of excess, craziness and chaos that gave him fame, but obscured the depth of the man and his literary talent.

Using Thompson’s publishing successes and pitfalls as guideposts, William McKeen’s biography, “Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson,” fans away the smoke of cigarettes, explosions and weed to reveal a writer who took his craft far more seriously than casual observers may have believed.

In fact, it is McKeen’s attention to Thompson’s career, craft and literary and cultural significance that gives this biography its value.

Not only does the book chart Thompson’s hardscrabble journey from neophyte writer for a U.S. Air Force base newspaper and struggling freelancer to his big break with the publication of “Hell’s Angels” and beyond, but it also provides an insight into his complex and contradictory approach to his work.

McKeen shows Thompson had a great love of books from a young age and aspired to write fiction, yet he gravitated toward journalism in attempts to pay the bills. Early in his career, the journalist went to great effort to be published. Yet when numerous writing offers poured in after his first major success with “Hell’s Angels,” he regularly failed to complete assignments. It was a notorious pattern that would plague him through the end of his life.

Yet it was the pieces he did complete and publish during that late-1960s and early-1970s period that catapulted Thompson into the national spotlight again and again.

Alongside the rise of the New Journalism work of Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and George Plimpton, Thompson stumbled upon his own inimitable style of journalism – gonzo – that literally put him at the center of the action and played fast and loose with the facts. A blessing and a curse, gonzo journalism brought him fame but wouldn’t let him escape the wildly drug-crazed persona he had created for himself as Raoul Duke, the main character Thompson cloaked himself in for “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

McKeen writes, “ ‘Gonzo,’ [Thompson] once sighed to a reporter. ‘I wish I’d never heard the word.’ ”

McKeen gathers comments from Thompson’s editors and other famous writers, including Wolfe and Carl Bernstein, to give credence to Thompson’s significance as a writer, journalist and man of letters.

In fuller view, the biography thoroughly chronicles the life Thompson lived from his modest youth as a juvenile delinquent in Louisville, Ky., through to the frustrations he faced before committing suicide.

Despite a friendship of sorts with Thompson, McKeen, a professor of journalism at the University of Florida, delivers a fully detailed and unbiased view of all aspects of the Thompson’s life – warts and all.