Didn't have a new act.....
HST wasn't a Beat, which was straight out of the 50's (not 60's). Hunter was an alcoholic drug eater who could write. He was more libertarian than left, hated Nixon along with virtually everyone else, was a passionate-- albeit cockeyed-- proponent of the 2nd Amendment (shotgun golf, anyone?), and admired virtually no one but Hunter S. Thompson.
He was a cultural black light illuminating a particular acid soaked moment in time.
He wasn't my brand of alembic pot stilled brandy. He was something just a little more volatile, grain alcohol, maybe; 120 proof, at the least, and when the proof had gone out of his writing he blew off the only thing a writer really has.
The tragedy for HST was that his mind had gone long before. It's a wonder he hadn't taken his life years earlier....