The hard cover of The Hell’s Angels Letters: Hunter S. Thompson, Margaret Harrell and the Making of an American Classic now joins the high-end paperback and e-book, ready to order at Norfolk Press.
Below are the updated, final (corrected) public links to all the Launch events July 16-18. The San Francisco Launch turned into a FESTIVAL.
Margaret A. Harrell Interview by David Streitfeld
Panel with Peter Richardson, William McKeen, Dr. Rory Patrick Feehan and David Streitfeld
The State of Gonzo Address: Ron Whitehead
Dr. Rory Patrick Feehan: Hunter S. Thompson Archives
Tim Devevi Interview and Reading
Live Gonzo Art with Grant Goodwine
At the historic Canessa Gallery where Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, and others, over the years, all passed through
Watch Dr. Rory Patrick Feehan display and describe his collection of Hunter Thompson artifacts – old magazine articles, etc. – all the way from Ireland
The hardcover is “the beautiful limited edition of just 120 books, signed and numbered by the Author. Signature sewn, the hard cover is hot stamped with white foil, on black Italian book cloth.”
Expert and entertaining contributors to the Launch (or Festival) included the list below, which gathers into One Place most of the Hunter Thompson experts in the world:
Grant Goodwine is a Louisville-Based Illustrator who has long been affiliated with the GONZO movement, including helping illustrate The Hell’s Angels Letters and annual posters for Gonzofest and even for Churchill Downs to help celebrate Hunter’s “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.” Grant puts in his effort to help conserve Hunter’s Legacy along with hopes of keeping Gonzo going.
Margaret A. Harrell is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, who was Hunter’s copy editor and Jim Silberman’s assistant editor on Hell’s Angels at Random House, as well as working on many successful books there. With degrees from Duke University and Columbia University, she studied three years at the C. G. Jung Institute Zurich. She has lived in the U.S., Morocco, Switzerland, and Belgium and has fourteen published books, including the Keep This Quiet! memoir series and The Hell’s Angels Letters. Multifaceted, she is an author, editor, advanced meditation (light body) teacher and experimental cloud photographer.
Ron Whitehead, poet, writer, editor, publisher, professor, scholar, activist, is the author of 24 books and 34 albums. Ron has produced thousands of events and festivals, including 24 & 48 & 72 & 90 hour non-stop music & poetry Insomniacthons, in Europe and the USA. He has presented thousands of readings, talks, and performances around the world. He has edited and published hundreds of titles. The recipient of many awards, his work has been translated into 20 languages. In 2018 Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer presented Ron with a Lifetime Achievement for Work in The Arts Award. Ron Whitehead has recently been selected to become the US National Beat Poet Laureate (2021–2022). He was in 2019 the first US citizen to be named UNESCO’s Tartu City of Literature Writer-in-Residence.. He is co-founder and Chief of Poetics for Gonzofest Louisville. Outlaw Poet: The Legend of Ron Whitehead documentary will be released by Storm Generation Films/Dark Star TV in 2021.
David Streitfeld is the editor of Hunter S. Thompson: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Melville House, 2018). The Last Interview series, which he edits, includes such authors as Gabriel García Márquez, Philip K. Dick and J. D. Salinger. He is a reporter for the New York Times, where in 2013 he was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has won various other prizes for his journalism. In the past he worked for the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
William McKeen is a professor and the Chairman of the Department of Journalism at Boston University; he is the author or editor of thirteen successful books, including Outlaw Journalist, Mile Marker Zero, and Everybody Had an Ocean. McKeen teaches courses on journalism history, literary journalism and rock n’ roll and American culture and previously taught at Western Kentucky University, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Florida, where he chaired the department of journalism.
Rory Patrick Feehan, PhD, is a Hunter S. Thompson Scholar and the founder of Totallygonzo.org. He graduated with a doctorate in English Language & Literature from the University of Limerick in 2018. He has spoken at the Louisville Gonzofest and at the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, on the opening night of their exhibit Gonzo: The Illustrated Guide to Hunter S. Thompson. A regular contributor to Beatdom, he has also recently contributed a piece on Thompson to the encyclopedia American Political Humor: Masters of Satire and Their Impact on U.S. Policy and Culture.
Tim Denevi is the author of Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism (PublicAffairs, 2018) and Hyper: A Personal History of ADHD (Simon & Schuster, 2014). His essays on politics, sport, and religion have recently appeared in The Paris Review, New York Magazine, Salon, The Normal School, and Literary Hub. He received his MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa, and he’s been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Tim is an assistant professor at George Mason University and lives near Washington, DC.
John F. Brick is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He specializes in American literary journalism of the 1960s and ’70s with a particular focus on Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo journalism, and among his long-term career goals is to see the burgeoning niche of Thompson studies coalesce around centralized, comprehensive archives. To that end, his work involves locating and cataloging—occasionally from unusual places—material by and about Thompson heretofore unknown to literary scholarship. Alongside his dissertation, Gonzo Eternal, Brick is also presently compiling a thorough annotated variorum of Thompson’s seminal Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (but don’t tell his dissertation director about that).
TK Tran is a Bay Area native who spends his days working in communications for a cybersecurity company. During his nights and weekends, he writes and performs country music locally and leads an off-roading club of over 40 members. In the past, he has hosted two weekly podcasts and moderated over 500 international online webinars. He is active in organizations such as West Coast Songwriters and Musicians on Call.
Alice Osborn is apoet, singer-songwriter, and book editor whose poetry collections include Heroes without Capes, After the Steaming Stops, and Unfinished Projects. She is hard at work on an album and a historical novel about the ill-fated Donner Party of 1846–’47. Searching for Paradise is her most recent album, featuring crowd-pleasing favorite originals. Alice is the recipient of a United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County 2019 Professional Development Grant; the President of the NC Songwriters’ Co-op, and she also plays and teaches fiddle, banjo, and mandolin. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her accountant husband, two talented teenagers, and four loud birds all named after musicians. Visit Alice’s website at https://aliceosborn.com and check out her music at https://reverbnation.com/aliceosborn.
Nick Storm is the founder of Kentucky Fried Politics, Kentucky’s source for political news. He is a veteran statewide reporter, anchor, and the former managing editor of cn|2 Pure Politics, a Kentucky statewide cable political news program. Nick broke numerous national and statewide stories, including an expose on former Gov. Julian Carroll who sought sex in exchange for help getting a man into art school. Nick’s work has been featured in The Intercept, Politico, Roll Call, The Hill, The Daily Beast, and The Washington Post among others. He is twice Emmy nominated, and the winner of the 2018 Society for Professional Journalists Louisville Chapter Investigative report of the year. Nick is a graduate of Leadership Louisville class of 2020. Nick’s documentary film Outlaw Poet: The Legend of Ron Whitehead, the story of a friend and contemporary of Kentuckian Hunter S. Thompson, is due to be released in 2021. Nick worked for the United States Department of Justice from August 2018 until January 2021.
Timothy Ferris is the author of a dozen books—among them the bestsellers The Whole Shebang and Coming of Age in the Milky Way. . . . A former editor of Rolling Stone magazine, he has published over 200 articles and essays. Ferris wrote and narrated three PBS documentary films—The Creation of the Universe (1986), Life Beyond Earth (1999), and Seeing in the Dark (2007). Ferris produced the Voyager phonograph record, an artifact of human civilization containing music and sounds of Earth launched aboard the twin Voyager interstellar spacecraft. . . . Ferris has received the American Institute of Physics prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. . . . A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor Ferris has taught in five disciplines—astronomy, English, history, journalism, and philosophy–at four universities. He is currently an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
