Published on May 2, 2020

Decadence and Depravity in Louisville, Kentucky

written by David S. Wills

Fifty years ago today, Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman drunkenly negotiated the pitfalls of Louisville’s Churchill Downs, home of the world-famous Kentucky Derby. At the time, Thompson was a moderately successful writer who had published an acclaimed book a few years earlier about his time among the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang. Steadman was a talented young artist from Wales who had traveled to the United States in search of work.

For Steadman and Thompson, it would be their first meeting, but it was hardly Thompson’s first derby. He had grown up in Louisville’s Cherokee Park area and was familiar with the whisky gentry who would be in attendance. As a teenager, Thompson’s wit, charm, intellect, and surly insubordination had made him popular among the city’s wealthy young men and women. However, he had never felt fully accepted and, when he was arrested along with a couple of classmates for holding up a car just shy of his graduation, his rich friends abandoned him to his fate—two months in prison.

After 10 years of surviving as a journalist, Thompson’s big break arrived in 1965, when he accepted an assignment from the Nation to investigate the rise of motorcycle gangs. The resulting article was a huge success, and offers from magazines and publishing companies began to pour in. In 1967, his first book, Hell’s Angels, was released to reviews that gushed over his wit and courage, and soon he was a hot literary talent. Despite the offers that came his way inviting him to file follow-up articles and book proposals, his literary output between 1967 and 1970 was not prodigious. However, in the few pieces of writing that he did publish, his prose style was already developing in a radical direction.


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