“To William J. Kennedy
Nov. 22, 1963
Woody Creek, Colorado
“There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything — much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder. God knows I might go mad for lack of talk. I have become like a psychotic sphinx — I want to kill because I can’t talk.
“I suppose you will say the rotten murder has no meaning for a true writer of fiction, and that the ‘real artists’ in the ‘little magazines’ are above such temporal things. I wish I could agree, but in fact I think what happened today is far more meaningful than the entire contents of the ‘little magazines’ for the past 20 years. And the next 20, if we get that far . . .
“Fiction is dead. Mailer is an antique curiosity. The stakes are now too high and the time too short . . . The only hope now is to swing hard with the right hand , while hanging onto sanity with the left. Politics will become a cockfight and reason will go by the boards. There will have to be somebody to carry the flag.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
The Proud Highway
