Early Life
Thompson was born into a middle class family in Louisville, Kentucky, the first of three sons, to Jack Robert Thompson (September 4, 1893, Horse Cave, Kentucky – July 3, 1952, Louisville), a public insurance adjuster and World War I veteran, and Virginia Ray Davison (1908, Springfield, Kentucky – March 20, 1998, Louisville), a librarian. His parents were introduced to each other by a friend from Jack's fraternity at the University of Kentucky in September 1934, and were married on November 2, 1935. Thompson's first name came from a purported ancestor on his mother's side, the Scottish surgeon John Hunter.
On December 2, 1943, when Thompson was six years old, the family settled at 2437 Ransdell Avenue, in the affluent Cherokee Triangle neighborhood of The Highlands. On July 3, 1952, when Thompson was 14 years old, his father, aged 58, died of myasthenia gravis. Hunter and his brothers, Davison Wheeler (born June 18, 1940) and James Garnet (February 2, 1949 – March 25, 1993), were raised by their mother. (Hunter also had a much older half-brother, James Thompson, Jr., from his father's first marriage. James, Jr. was not part of the Thompson household.)
Virginia worked as a librarian to support her children, and is described as having become a "heavy drinker" following her husband's death.
Read more about this topic: Hunter S. Thompson
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)