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In the spring of 1970, a British illustrator named Ralph Steadman had just moved to America, hoping to find some work. His first call came from a small literary journal called Scanlan's. It was looking for a cartoonist to send to the Kentucky Derby. Steadman had heard of neither the race nor the writer he was to accompany, a fellow named Hunter S. Thompson.

Steadman hadn't read any of Thompson's work, and he certainly didn't know that the writer had a bit of a drinking tendency, but he agreed to go.

One booze-riddled weekend later, Scanlan's published the essay and launched Thompson into stardom. "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" so fascinated audiences that one Boston Globe writer deemed it "gonzo" — a term that would stick with Hunter S. Thompson for good.

'The Real Beasts Perform'

Steadman and Thompson flew into Louisville separately and met at Churchill Downs to pick up their press credentials. As Thompson led Steadman around the racetrack, it quickly became clear that the two wouldn't be watching much horse racing.

"We went into the inner field first to just look at the people," he tells weekends on All Things Considered host Kelly McEvers. "We were really looking for odd faces. People that were kind of weird, you know? That seemed to become our real purpose."

It was Thompson's idea. They'd seek out the "whiskey gentry," as the writer called them, and there they'd find that face: "a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis."

That search became the central narrative of the essay. "We didn't give a hoot in hell what was happening on the track," Thompson wrote. "We'd come to watch the real beasts perform."