BOISE, Idaho — A young Hunter S. Thompson went to Idaho to write about Ernest Hemingway and decided to take a piece of his hero’s home with him – a set of trophy elk antlers.

More than half a century later, the gonzo journalist’s wife returned the antlers to Hemingway’s house in the mountain town of Ketchum.

“One of the stories that has often been told over the years is the story of Hunter S. Thompson taking the antlers,” said Jenny Emery Davidson of Ketchum Community Library.

Davidson was there on Aug. 5 when Thompson’s widow, Anita Thompson, gave back the antlers she says her husband regretted taking. Hemingway’s house is owned by The Nature Conservancy, which has an agreement with the library to help catalog and preserve items in the residence where the author took his own life.

In 1964, Hunter Thompson, then 27, came to Ketchum when he was still a conventional journalist. He had not yet developed his signature style, dubbed gonzo journalism, that involved inserting himself, often outrageously, into his reporting and that propelled him into a larger-than-life figure.

Thompson was writing a story for the National Observer about why the globe-trotting Hemingway shot and killed himself at his home three years earlier at age 61. Thompson attributed the suicide in part to rapid changes in the world that led to upheavals in places Hemingway loved most – Africa and Cuba. Even Ketchum, which in the 1930s and 1940s attracted luminaries such as Gary Cooper, had fallen off the map of cafe society by the late 1950s.

– From news service reports


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