The Proud Highway

1955
 
 
LOUISVILLE IN THE FIFTIES   SLOE GIN, SLEAZY DEBUTANTES, AND THE GOOD LIFE IN CHEROKEE PARK   FROM ATHENAEUM HILL TO THE JEFFERSON COUNTY JAIL   WELCOME TO THE PROUD HIGHWAY 
So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
Hunter S. Thompson, age seventeen
 
THIRD PRIZE ESSAY NETTLEROTH CONTEST
OPEN LETTER TO THE YOUTH OF OUR NATION
BY HUNTER THOMPSON, 1955
 
Although the young Thompson was forever in trouble with the law, his Louisville Male High School English teacher Harold Tague deemed him brilliant and unpredictable. Thompson s sardonic essays for the Athenaeum Literary Association s bound yearbook, The Spectator, consistently poked fun at middle-class conformity.
 
The Athenaeum had been a respected literary society based at Male since June 1862 the month that Robert E. Lee took command of the Confederate army.
 
Young people of America, awake from your slumber of indolence and harken the call of the future! Do you realize that you are rapidly becoming a doomed generation? Do you realize that the fate of the world and of generations to come rests on your shoulders? Do you realize that at any time you may be called on to protect your country and the freedom of the world from the creeping scourge of Communism? How can you possibly laugh in the face of the disasters which face us from all sides? Oh ignorant youth, the world is not a joyous place. The time has come for you to dispense with the frivolous pleasures of childhood and get down to honest toil until you are sixty-five. Then and only then can you relax and collect your social security and live happily until the time of your death.
 
Also, your insolent attitude disturbs me greatly. You have the nerve to say that you have never known what it is like to

Hunter S. Thompson (July 18, 1937 February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author. He was known for his flamboyant writing style, most notably deployed in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which blurred the distinctions between writer and subject, fiction and nonfiction. The best source on Thompson's writing style and personality is Thompson himself. His books include Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1966), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1972), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72 (1973); The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (1979); The Curse of Lono (1983); Generation of Swine, Gonzo Papers Vol. 2: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 80's (1988); and Songs of the Doomed (1990).

William J. Kennedy, author, screenwriter and playwright, was born and raised in Albany, New York. Kennedy brought his native city to literary life in many of his works. The Albany cycle includes Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and the Pulitzer Prize winning Ironweed.

Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University, the CNN Presidential Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Audubon. The Chicago Tribune has dubbed him America s new past master. His recent Cronkite won the Sperber Prize for Best Book in Journalism and was a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year. The Great Deluge won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and the Council on Foreign Relations. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.