In 2005, on a Colorado mountainside, a 153-foot cannon shaped like a double-thumbed fist fired a man's ashes into the sky while fireworks exploded and Mr. Tambourine Man played over loudspeakers, a $3 million send-off funded by Johnny Depp. What kind of life earns a goodbye like that? The answer is Hunter S. Thompson: literary genius, cultural phenomenon, and dark cautionary tale, all at once.

This episode follows the Kentucky kid who missed his own graduation in a jail cell, faked a resume to become an Air Force sports editor, and was discharged for a "rebel and superior attitude." It traces the private apprenticeship of retyping Gatsby word for word, the year embedded with the Hells Angels that invented gonzo journalism, and the tragic bind of a writer who believed the thing destroying him was the source of his talent. It ends with the cl ...