Almost from the start we read Thompson railing, inveighing, tilting, and flinging down malediction. In a pig's eye. Already we hear the Thompson note, the ramped-up hyperbole that strains to get across his sense of outrage at the doings of the larger world. Here is Thompson's truest register. Like Lenny Bruce, like Norman Mailer at his best, or Allen Ginsberg at his, he found a way to say what needed saying.
Few people have the temerity to reach that far into the hoard of their rage.
Though years would have to pass before the author achieved his full notoriety, from this point on we feel it is somehow just a matter of time. Thompson's course was set, and so was the country's. The rendezvous lay ahead. Premonitions of the convergence keep coming. Mailer, at Berkeley, told a crowd of 10,000 that Johnson is insane, and they cheered wildly.