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"The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" is a seminal sports article written by journalist Hunter S. Thompson on the 1970 Kentucky Derby, which first appeared in Scanlan's Monthly in June of that year. The article marked the birth of what would become known as "gonzo journalism".
The idea for the story began at a dinner party at the Aspen, Colorado, home of novelist James Salter. Hunter S. Thompson queried Scanlan's Monthly editor Warren Hinckle, who approved the project and paired Thompson with illustrator Ralph Steadman for the first time. [1]
The genesis of the article has been described by Thompson as akin to "falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids". [2] Faced with a deadline and without any coherent story for his editors, Thompson began tearing pages from his notebook, numbering them, and sending them to the magazine. Accompanied by Ralph Steadman's sketches (the first of many collaborations between Thompson and Steadman), the resulting story, and the manic, first-person subjectivity that characterized it, were the beginnings of gonzo journalism.
The article is less about the actual Kentucky Derby – indeed, Thompson and Steadman could not actually see the race from their standpoint – than the revelry surrounding the event. Thompson's depiction includes the events in Louisville, his hometown, in the days before and after the Derby, and Steadman captured the debauched atmosphere in his surreal drawings. Thompson provided up-close views of activities in the Derby infield and the grandstand at Churchill Downs, and a running commentary on the drunkenness and lewdness of the crowd, which he states in the article as the only thing he was focusing on. The narrative ends with Thompson and Steadman's realization that, by participating in the drunken pageantry of the event, they had become exactly what they had originally planned to caricature.
Shortly after Thompson's suicide in 2005, Steadman recalled his first impression of Thompson at the Kentucky Derby to the British newspaper The Independent :
I had turned around and two fierce eyes, firmly socketed inside a bullet-shaped head, were staring at a strange growth I was nurturing on the end of my chin. "Holy shit!" [Thompson] exclaimed. "They said I was looking for a matted-haired geek with string warts and I guess I've found him." ...This man had an impressive head chiseled from one piece of bone, and the top part was covered down to his eyes by a floppy-brimmed sun hat. His top half was draped in a loose-fitting hunting jacket of multi-colored patchwork. He wore seersucker blue pants, and the whole torso was pivoted on a pair of huge white plimsolls with a fine red trim around the bulkheads. Damn near 6-foot-6 of solid bone and meat holding a beaten-up leather bag across his knee and a loaded cigarette holder between the arthritic fingers of his other hand. [3]
The article was first released in the June 1970 edition of Scanlan's Monthly. It was later reprinted in Tom Wolfe's 1973 anthology The New Journalism and in Thompson's 1979 anthology The Great Shark Hunt .
The article was not widely read at the time, but Thompson did garner attention from other journalists for its unusual style. In 1970, Bill Cardoso, editor of The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, wrote to Thompson, whom he had met on a bus full of journalists covering the 1968 New Hampshire presidential primaries. Cardoso praised the piece as a breakthrough: "This is it, this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling." Considered the first use of the word "gonzo" to describe Thompson's work, Thompson took to the word right away, and according to Steadman said, "Okay, that's what I do. Gonzo." [4]
Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story using a first-person narrative. The word "gonzo" is believed to have been first used in 1970 to describe an article about the Kentucky Derby by Hunter S. Thompson, who popularized the style. It is an energetic first-person participatory writing style in which the author is a protagonist, and it draws its power from a combination of social critique and self-satire. It has since been applied to other subjective artistic endeavors.
Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author. He rose to prominence with the publication of Hell's Angels (1967), a book for which he spent a year living with the Hells Angels motorcycle club to write a first-hand account of their lives and experiences. In 1970, he wrote an unconventional article titled "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" for Scanlan's Monthly, which further raised his profile as a countercultural figure. It also set him on the path to establishing his own subgenre of New Journalism that he called "Gonzo", a journalistic style in which the writer becomes a central figure and participant in the events of the narrative.
Oscar "Zeta" Acosta Fierro was a Mexican American attorney, author and activist in the Chicano Movement. He wrote the semi-autobiographical novels Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), and was friends with American author Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson characterized him as a heavyweight Samoan attorney, Dr. Gonzo, in his 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Acosta disappeared in 1974 during a trip in Mexico and is presumed dead.
New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction. Using extensive imagery, reporters interpolate subjective language within facts whilst immersing themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. In traditional journalism, the journalist is "invisible"; facts are meant to be reported objectively.
Ralph Idris Steadman is a British illustrator best known for his collaboration with the American writer Hunter S. Thompson. Steadman is renowned for his satirical political cartoons, social caricatures, and picture books.
Raoul Duke is the partially fictionalized author surrogate character and sometimes pseudonym used by Hunter S. Thompson as the main character and antihero for many of his works. He is perhaps best known as the narrator for his 1971 autobiographical novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The book was originally written under the name Raoul Duke. The character wears a bucket hat and yellow tinted aviator sunglasses.
"The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy" is an article published in the premiere issue of Scanlan's Monthly in March 1970, written by Hunter S. Thompson.
The Great Shark Hunt is a book by Hunter S. Thompson. Originally published in 1979 as Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, the book is a roughly 600-page collection of Thompson's essays from 1956 to the end of the 1970s, including the rise of the author's own gonzo journalism style as he moved from Air Force and sports beat writing to straight-ahead political commentary. It is the first of what would become four volumes in The Gonzo Papers series.
Scanlan's Monthly was a New York, New York and St. Jean, Quebec monthly publication that ran from March 1970 to January 1971. The publisher was Scanlan's Literary House. Edited by Warren Hinckle and Sidney Zion, it featured politically controversial muckraking and was ultimately subject to an investigation by the FBI during the Nixon administration.
William Joseph Cardoso was an American journalist who was known for coining the term "gonzo journalism".
The Curse of Lono is a book by Hunter S. Thompson describing his experiences in Hawaii in 1980. Originally published in 1983, the book was only in print for a short while. In 2005 it was re-released as a limited edition. Only 1000 copies were produced, each one being signed by the author and artist Ralph Steadman.The book is now available as a smaller hardcover edition.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a 1971 novel in the gonzo journalism style by Hunter S. Thompson. The book is a roman à clef, rooted in autobiographical incidents. The story follows its protagonist, Raoul Duke, and his attorney, Doctor Gonzo, as they descend on Las Vegas to chase the American Dream through a drug-induced haze, all the while ruminating on the failure of the 1960s countercultural movement. The work is Thompson's most famous book and is noted for its lurid descriptions of illicit drug use and its early retrospective on the culture of the 1960s. Thompson's highly subjective blend of fact and fiction, which it popularized, became known as gonzo journalism. Illustrated by Ralph Steadman, the novel first appeared as a two-part series in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971 before being published in book form in 1972. It was later adapted into a film of the same title in 1998 by director Terry Gilliam, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro, who portrayed Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, respectively.
Dust Commander was an American Thoroughbred race horse.
Gonzo Papers, Vol. 3: Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream is a book by the American writer and journalist Hunter S. Thompson, originally published in 1990. The third installment of the four-volume The Gonzo Papers, it is a chronologically arranged selection of essays, newspaper articles, stories and letters, allowing readers to see how Thompson's brand of New Journalism, also termed Gonzo journalism, evolved over the years. Songs of the Doomed is mostly made up of pieces written between 1980 and 1990, but there is also some older material, including excerpts from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, his unfinished first novel, Prince Jellyfish, which is still unpublished, and The Rum Diary, which was not published in its entirety until 1998.
Bibliography of works by American author and journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
The Joke's Over: Bruised Memories—Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson, and Me is a book written and illustrated by Ralph Steadman chronicling the odd and very often dangerous times when he met and worked with his friend Hunter S. Thompson. It contains some illustrations by Steadman created at the time of the events and some photos taken by Steadman or Thompson. It was published in 2006 by Heinemann in the UK and, perhaps during the same year, by Harcourt in the US.
Warren James Hinckle III 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.
The term "journalism genres" refers to various journalism styles, fields or separate genres, in writing accounts of events.
The 1970 Kentucky Derby was the 96th running of the Kentucky Derby. The race took place on May 2, 1970.
Gonzo Today is an internet-based publication inspired by the writing and reporting style of gonzo journalism popularized by Hunter Thompson.
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