Hunter S. Thompson (AP Photo)

Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a friend of Thompson, and Thompson's son, Juan, who reportedly found his father's body, confirmed the death of the 67-year-old writer to the Aspen Daily News.

"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," Juan Thompson said in a statement to the newspaper, according to the Associated Press.

Thompson's wife, Anita, was not home at the time of his death.

San Francisco writer Ben Fong-Torres, a former colleague of Thompson's at Rolling Stone magazine, said he was surprised and saddened to hear about Thompson's apparent suicide.

"He was one of the great pioneers of new journalism and his own invention: gonzo journalism, in which he immersed himself in the story," Fong-Torres said. "He presented it in a way that nobody else, as hard as they tried, could imitate. He was singular and will not be matched anytime soon."

Fong-Torres said Thompson leaves a legacy in the field of journalism.

"It doesn't matter that he was a guy who was capable of doing anything and known to live on-and-beyond the edge," he said in a phone interview Sunday night. "It's a tremendous loss, no matter where he was, at what stage he was, how ill he had gotten -- he was still capable of humorous insights."

Chronicle Executive Vice President and Editor Phil Bronstein spent a few nights last summer with Thompson and his wife in Colorado. He said that Thompson was recovering from spinal surgery and a broken leg from a fall but that there were no signs that the eccentric Thompson was depressed.

They watched the Republican Convention and hours of footage for a documentary that was being made about Thompson. He showed off a new neon shooting target he had, and he held court at the local Woody Creek Tavern, Bronstein said.

"He was exercised about what was going on in the world as he always was," Bronstein said. "He seemed, as always, bizarre and interesting and fascinating and was a remarkably charming and friendly host."

Thompson, who wrote for the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner in the mid-to-late 1980s, lived the legend he created with his writing.

David McCumber, a former editor at the Examiner and now managing editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, edited Thompson's columns at the Examiner in the mid-1980s.

"Everything was legitimate about the man's reputation," he said. "The surprise was as I got to know him ... everything was real ... and that could be scary sometimes."

UNCLE DUKE Doonesbury character was based on Hunter S. Thompson

He said that one day he was on a three-way call with Thompson and Gary Hart's campaign manager when the campaign manager learned that the Miami Herald had the story about Hart's relationship with Donna Rice.

Thompson was at his home in Woody Creek outside Aspen and remembered that his neighbor singer/songwriter Don Henley knew Rice. He went to Henley's house, rifled his drawers, and found a picture for the Examiner, making it the first news organization to have a picture of Rice.

"We always had a very active time. It was never dull," McCumber said. "One of the joys of editing Hunter was you never knew if you were going to get hallucinatory prose or trenchant analysis," he said.

Jeanette Etheredge, another close friend of Thompson and owner of the North Beach fixture, Tosca, said he knew where every ice machine was at every motel in San Francisco.

One night when they were out driving around, he stopped abruptly in front of the Seal Rock Inn and jumped out.

"When he came back, he had a bucket of ice for his bottle," she said.

Chronicle Executive News Editor Jay Johnson, who also edited Thompson's columns when he wrote for the Examiner, said Thompson could not dictate over the phone, so he filed his stories page by page over the fax, sending multiple revisions as the two spent many hours throughout the night and into the morning "wrestling the column to the ground."

"Nobody was as much his editor as his sounding board. He needed to talk it out and get reaction to it. It was not the average creative process," Johnson said.

One morning as deadline neared and they were still working it out, Thompson, who was known to have an affinity for controlled substances, told Johnson, "Our real drug of choice is adrenaline."

Johnson said Thompson was easiest to work with when he was covering a presidential campaign. But he was often just "riffing," Johnson said.

He fondly recalled one night when Thompson told him how he had tried to cheer up a friend who was scheduled to go in for back surgery. He took a bunch of explosives out to the backyard and stuffed them into his Jeep. As the hood flew into the air and the Jeep exploded into pieces, the two friends realized what they had projected into the sky would soon come back down.

"They are like dancing around with this shrapnel coming down," Johnson said.

Johnson told him to write it down and that became Thompson's next column.

Johnson said it seemed that part of the reason Thompson enjoyed writing his column for the Examiner was that he had a burning desire to be plugged in. In the days before the Internet, Thompson turned to Johnson to give him the latest news.

"By calling in, he could ask what was on the wires. He would ask me to read him stuff. That way he could be involved in the business," Johnson said.

When he was in San Francisco, Thompson was a regular at Tosca, even running the bar once when owner Etheredge was out getting a root canal.

He broke his ankle once doing a pirouette off the bar, she said, and then refused medical help, instead taping his broken ankle with electrical tape.

She said he was always a gentleman. One time after hanging out at his hotel all night and into the morning, she told him that she had to go home. It was about 5 a.m. and he insisted on escorting her in a taxi.

But when they were walking through the hotel lobby to get into a cab, she noticed he was wearing just underwear. And when they reached her house, she had to give him money to get back to the hotel.

Sunday night, she was shocked by the death of someone who was so vibrant.

"I spoke to him a few weeks ago and he sounded good," she said. "The one person I would never think would do something like that goes and does it."

Thompson was born in Louisville, Ky., on July 18, 1937, His father, Jack, was an insurance agent. Thompson got his start in newspaper writing while he was serving in the Air Force in the late 1950s.

An acute observer of the decadence and depravity in American life, Thompson wrote such books as "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" in 1973 and the collections "Generation of Swine" and "Songs of the Doomed." His first- ever novel, "The Rum Diary," written in 1959, was first published in 1998.

"The Rum Diary" came out of Thompson's experiences in Puerto Rico. Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Kennedy, who had been friends with Thompson since he rejected the then-young writer for a job at the San Juan Star in Puerto Rico, described Thompson as a trailblazer.

"Hunter found a way to be new in the world. His attitude, his language, his subject matter, his take on history, his plunge into booze and drugs -- all these were singular," Kennedy said. "Maybe other people behaved this way, but nobody ever wrote about it with such spectacular originality. He was all by himself."

Thompson's other books include "Hell's Angels" and "The Proud Highway." His most recent effort was "Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and The Downward Spiral of Dumbness."

"Hunter was a gifted writer, political observer and sportsman with a huge appetite for life in every dimension," said William R. Hearst III, a director of the Hearst Corp. "Like Mark Twain before him he occasionally wrote for this newspaper and neither of them tolerated fools gleefully. We will miss his words and collect his letters."

Chronicle news services and staff writers Suzanne Herel and Bob Miller contributed to this report.E-mail Tanya Schevitz at tschevitz@sfchronicle.com.

© 2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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