P.J. O’Rourke’s death marks the end of a great satirical era

There was something old school about P.J. O’Rourke, who died on Tuesday, something that felt like a leftover echo of the American Revolution. Visiting him in his ancient, low-ceilinged, clapboard farm-house in Sharon, New Hampshire, one half-expected Paul Revere to burst breathlessly into the kitchen warning that the British were coming.

Though he was by birth an Ohio boy, New England felt like the tweedy satirist’s natural environment — a pioneer sensibility that combined American impatience with the Old World with a nostalgic yearning for the oak-panelled values and certainties of yesteryear.

Never quite a ‘gonzo’ journalist, his departure to the cigar bar in the sky nonetheless marks the end of a great satirical era that he shared with Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Of the three, O’Rourke was both the funniest and the gentlest.

Having met him only a few months before, he generously agreed during the 2020 presidential primaries to put me up in his writing room at March Hare farm and take me on a tour of the candidates’ stump speeches at local school halls.