Warren Hinckle

Warren James Hinckle III (October 12, 1938 – August 25, 2016) was an American political journalist based in San Francisco. Hinckle is remembered for his tenure as editor of Ramparts magazine, turning a sleepy publication aimed at a liberal Roman Catholic audience into a major galvanizing force of American radicalism during the Vietnam War era. He also helped create Gonzo journalism by first pairing Hunter S. Thompson with illustrator Ralph Steadman.

Hinckle was born in San Francisco to Warren James Hinckle Jr., a dockworker, and Angela Catherine DeVere, who survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. He graduated from Archbishop Riordan High School in 1956.

As a student at the University of San Francisco, Warren Hinckle wrote for the student newspaper, the San Francisco Foghorn. After college, he worked for the San Francisco Chronicle.

From 1964 to 1969, he was executive editor of Ramparts. Under his leadership, it became a widely circulated muckraking magazine that was based in San Francisco and heavily involved in antiwar New Left politics. In 1966, the magazine won the prestigious George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting.

Hinckle wrote the cover story, "The Social History of the Hippies," for the March 1967 issue. Contributing editor Ralph J. Gleason resigned in protest and turned his attention to a new magazine, Rolling Stone, which he co-founded with former Ramparts staffer Jann Wenner; its first issue appeared later that year.

In 1967, Hinckle was among more than 500 writers and editors who signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse to pay the 10% Vietnam War Tax surcharge proposed by president Johnson.

After leaving Ramparts in 1969, Hinckle co-founded and edited the magazine Scanlan's Monthly with New York journalist Sidney Zion. There he matched illustrator Ralph Steadman with Hunter S. Thompson to produce "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" (1970), the first work of Gonzo journalism.

After Scanlan's folded in 1971, Hinckle was involved with a number of publications, including editing Francis Ford Coppola's ambitious City magazine, which ceased publication in 1976. In 1991 he revived The Argonaut, and was its editor and publisher and also of its online version, Argonaut360.