Hunter S. Thompson is back in my personal news cycle.

In a recent review of the new book Trudeau and Doonesbury: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News Into Art by Joshua Kendall, the New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner wrote about how Trudeau modeled his Duke character after the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Apparently, Thompson “despised the portrayal and sent Trudeau a wad of used toilet paper in the mail.”

This blurb triggered something I wrote in my old Book Shopper blog posted on July 2, 2011. The date was the 50^th anniversary of the death of Ernest Hemingway and I remembered Thompson’s 1964 essay “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?” Thompson visits the Idaho town where Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun on July 2, 1961.  In the Ketchum story, Thompson prophetically says that writers who lose their power of conviction lose the willingness to create art out of chaos.

It became a more interesting read in light of Thompson’s own suicide by gunshot at his Colorado home in February, 2005.

You can find the essay in the Thompson collection, The Great Shark Hunt (1979), which I paid $2 for way back when. (The book also contains the famous opening line from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”)

Admittedly this triggered other memories for me since my father was a fan of Doonesbury and the Duke. I bought him a copy of Nicholas von Hoffman’s Tales from the Margaret Mead Taproom, (1976) for his birthday.

Trudeau came up with the idea of sending Duke in Pago Pago from Thompson himself. In Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 . the author confessed that he relentlessly pursued the chairman of the Democratic Party to appoint him as the Governor of American Samoa. Of course, this never was going to come to fruition, and Thompson wrote “It made me very bitter and eventually changed my whole life.”

This explains why Thompson sent Trudeau a wad of used toilet paper.