Some lovely thoughts about Hunter S. in the NYT and Rolling Stone:

From The Thompson Style: A Sense of Self, and of Outrage, by David Carr:

For a generation of American students, Mr. Thompson made journalism seem like a dangerous, fantastic occupation, in the process transforming an avocation that was mostly populated by doughy white men in short-sleeve white button-downs and bad ties into something fit for those who smoked Dunhills at the end of cigarette holders and wore sunglasses regardless of the time of day. It is to his credit or blame that many aspiring journalists showed up to cover their first, second, and sometimes third local city council meetings in bowling shirts and bad sunglasses (no names need be mentioned here), along with their notebooks.

For all of the pharmacological foundations of his stories, Mr. Thompson was a reporter, taking to the task of finding out what other people knew with an avidity that earned the respect of even those who found his personal hobbies reprehensible. Hunter S. Thompson knew stuff and wrote about it in a way that could leave his colleagues breathless and vowing to do better.

He had a gift for sentence writing, and he tended to write a lot of them. But his loquaciousness was not restricted to articles and books. In "Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist," his memoir published in 2000 which was composed of correspondence, it became clear how in his hands even the lowly expense report, usually a relentlessly banal document, could be a thing of beauty.

From the Rolling Stone obit:

Reclusive and often unintelligible in conversation, Thompson had a persona that was ripe for caricature. Both Bill Murray and Johnny Depp portrayed him in feature films (Murray in Where the Buffalo Roam, Depp in the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). He was also Garry Trudeau's inspiration for Uncle Duke, the loose cannon of the Doonesbury comic strip. Thompson's incorrigible behavior, his mumbling incoherence, his fishing hats, aviator frames and cigarette holders all made for a larger-than-life presence. He was a hardboiled writer of the old Hemingway school, terse and piercing, enamored of guns. Yet he will be forever associated with the counterculture of the hippie era for his ruthless dogging of the Nixon administration and his gleeful experimentation with psychedelic drugs, two subjects which he often wrote about in tandem. ...

His wild, licentious writing style lost him innumerable assignments, but Thompson invented a whole new genre when a fellow journalist called his feature on the skier Jean-Claude Killy "gonzo." The piece was written for Playboy, which turned it down; it was published by a fellow maverick, San Franciscan Warren Hinckle. Thompson later said that his realization that he could "get away with" such an outrageous writing style convinced him to stop trying to write "like the New York Times. It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids."

Thompson's first pitch for Rolling Stone was similarly the stuff of legend. A staffer later recalled the writer drinking a six-pack, playing with his wig and ranting non-stop for an hour with publisher Jann Wenner, who was sufficiently overwhelmed to hire him. ...

If he feared anything, Thompson knew how to hide it well. "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone," he once said, "but they've always worked for me."

This is a famous Thompson quote:

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

There's an interesting posting about it in about.com's urban legends area.