Malcom X and Hunter S. Thompson

Today marks the passage of two compelling and original American figures, and the power of the word.

First, Malcolm X was shot to death 40 years ago today at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. Secondly, Hunter S. Thompson took his life within the past 24 hours.

The real power of Malcolm X was his unique ability to communicate his personal transformation to a wide audience. In his lifetime, Malcolm X was many men.

Born Malcolm Little, he later became "Detroit Red" and "New York Red" - a hustler, drug pusher, pimp, con man and the head of a Boston robbery ring. After spending time in prison, he emerged as Minister Malcolm - Malcolm X, the fiery, eloquent spokesman for the Nation of Islam. Finally, he became El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, an internationally recognized leader and advocate for oppressed peoples.

The power of this personal odyssey is most evident in his book The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

“The Autobiography,” is a work whose blazing candor and unflinching self-examination inspired Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, and remains a seminal American work. In 1999, Time magazine selected the book as one of the top 10 nonfiction works of the 20th century.

Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, fatally shot himself Sunday night in Aspen, Colorado.

Thompson is credited alongside Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese with helping pioneer New Journalism — a subjective, first-person form of journalism, in which the writer made himself an essential component of the story.

The respectable, detached, objective tone demanded by mainstream American journalism was, Thompson thought, a powerful ingredient in the banality and dishonesty of American life.

Thompson’s style was aggressive, cynical and fiercely skeptical, and he stripped away layers of unquestioning respect for politicians.

President Nixon once famously said Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character."

In turn, Thompson felt that Nixon spoke "for the werewolf in us."

Thompson's great legacy was his realisation, as he wrote in The Great Shark Hunt, that "the writer must be a participant in the scene ... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character."

Both Malcolm X and Hunter S. Thompson were passionate about pursuing the truth and holding America accountable for its noble ideals.