Using pure originality in the quest for work

Written by Carter Johnson
Wednesday, 22 June 2011 23:00

In October 1958, a young unemployed writer with a strong habit for debt and for the bottle wrote a letter to the Vancouver Sun. He was seeking a meaningful mode of employment. The young man wrote, “Since I haven’t seen a copy of the new Sun yet, I’ll have to make this a tentative offer. I stepped into a dung-hole the last time I took a job with a paper I didn’t know anything about… By the time you get this letter, I’ll have gotten hold of some recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I’ll let my offer stand.”

The young man was Hunter S. Thompson, and only 10 or so years later he would be acknowledged as the founder of his own radical brand of reporting — “Gonzo” journalism.

Such a letter, besides reminding the general populace that everyone, even that paragon of American journalism Mr. Thompson, has had to start somewhere, serves as a reminder that nothing can ever beat pure, honest and straightforward originality.

It is perhaps too young, writing still as an attendant of high school, to speak of applying for a job. But at this age many are occupied with a job application in a different sense. For what is college but a four-year period of work? College is, at the most basic level, a job and its application can be treated in somewhat the same vein.

It is an age-old maxim — originality always trumps orthodoxy. It is a natural instinct to desire attention, and the sure way to grab attention is through novelty, essentially, by marking oneself as different from everyone else. It sounds narcissistic, yes, but the whole concept of applying for a job or for college is self-referential to the core. And so what is just as important as what one says is how one says it.

I don’t know if Mr. Thompson was awarded the job at the Vancouver Sun and refused, having come into something else, or whether he was even awarded the job in the first place. Either way, there is no record of him having ever worked at the newspaper. It is very possible that his off-putting letter frightened his would-be editors, something I’d imagine can never be beneficial in a job search.

Yet in his words one finds the very characteristics that made Hunter Thompson such a revered and infamous figure in American literature and culture — his brashness, his say-what-I-mean attitude, and above all his honesty in observing the world he lived in.

When one speaks of American writers they often speak of the “great ones,” writers whose work has not only influenced but created an American literary tradition.

Hemingway and Twain come to mind, and of the poets, perhaps Eliot — and yes, in the realm of journalism, Hunter Thompson. All of them share a common thread of speaking plainly, honestly and sincerely. When it comes time to write for ourselves, to put ourselves on display for others to examine and scrutinize, we will ultimately do very well to learn from Mr. Thompson and his compatriots.

Carter Johnson is a rising senior from Greenwich at Brunswick School.