It was a face I’d seen a thousand times at every Derby I’d ever been to. We hadn’t seen that special kind of face that I felt we would need for a lead drawing. The essay, alongside Steadman’s apocalyptic sketches, mostly snubs the horse race, instead fixating on the local inhabitants and cultural milieu surrounding the derby’s pageantry and debauchery: What ensued was a frenzied 7200-word, now infamous, first-person account entitled “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” It was the genesis of gonzo journalism - a unique cocktail of “close to the bone” reporting with subjective, participatory and satirical narration.

Straightaway, Hinckle endorsed the pitch and within an hour booked Thompson a ticket, wired expense money and began the hunt for an artist to illustrate the event Hunter loathed working with photographers, so Hinckle arranged for British illustrator Ralph Steadman, already scheduled to fly to the states, to meet Thompson in Louisville. It’s the greatest spectacle the country can produce.” Intrigued, Thompson immediately phoned his editor Warren Hinckle in San Francisco at 3:30 in the morning, shouting “I have a great idea, we must do the derby. During the meal Salter prompted Thompson, asking the Kentucky native if he planned on attending the upcoming derby. Less than 72 hours before the race, Thompson was over 1300 miles from Churchill Downs in Aspen, Colorado, busy having, as he later recalled, “one of those long European dinners with lots of wine” with novelist Jim Salter. Thompson returned to his hometown of Louisville to cover the 96th running of the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s Monthly.

In the spring of 1970, thirty-two-year-old writer Hunter S. Thompson Churchill Downs Louisville, Kentucky

The Mind behind the Eye by Joseph Green