HST's passion
A topic touched on in a couple Hunter S. Thompson tributes: Thompson's passion for journalism and the reasons he left it to try something new. Check out Phil Luciano, and Henry Allen in the Washington Post.
And I love this line in David Carr's appreciation in the NYT:

Of all of the so-called practitioners of New Journalism, Mr. Thompson was the one who was willing to insert himself and his capacious reserve of outrage into the middle of every story...Not only was he not neutral, he was angry, an avenging proxy for the American polity. Brick by brick, he tore away a wall - since rebuilt - that made politics seem like a low-stakes minstrel show.