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.
Strange pollen is in the air.
They will lift the top of your head right off. During the mid-1960s, Thompson, who had been writing journalism of various descriptions for nearly a decade, began to acquire a reputation among progressive political and cultural magazines as a writer who could take the pulse of the American fringe. What would become his celebrated first book, Hell's Angels, began as a piece of reportage for The Nation. Thompson was simply not content to work from conventional sources, at a distance. He got a bike, got close to Angel leader Sonny Barger, and he rode.