Before he became the wildest writer of his generation, a young Hunter S. Thompson sat at a manual typewriter in New York retyping The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms word for word to feel the rhythm of great prose. This episode traces the tension between that reverence for literary discipline and his lifelong allergy to authority, from his father’s death when he was 14 in Louisville, a 31-day jail stint that cost him his high school graduation, and a forged resume that made him sports editor of an Air Force base newspaper until his commanding officer pushed him out in 1958.

We follow the year he spent riding with the Hells Angels and the beating that ended it, his 1970 Freak Power run for sheriff of Pitkin County, and the blown Kentucky Derby deadline that produced the raw notebook pages first labeled gonzo. From there came the Las Vegas assignment that turned a 250-word caption into an epic, the 1972 campaign coverage that invented rumors about Edmund Muskie, and the long decline as cocaine replaced amphetamines, culminating in his 2005 death and ashes fired from a cannon.

• Why the Air Force discharge evaluation praised his talent but called his attitude contagious
• How his Hells Angels book dismantled the myth of the noble outlaw biker
• Why shaving his head let him call his crew-cut opponent the long-haired candidate
• How fabricated scenes were meant to expose the scripted reality of political campaigns
• The missed Rumble in the Jungle and fall of Saigon assignments that marked his professional collapse