What originally was a two-hundred-fifty-word photo-caption-job for `` Sports Illustrated '' grew to a novel-length feature story for `` Rolling Stone '' ; Thompson said publisher Jann Wenner had `` liked the first 20 or so jangled pages enough to take it seriously on its own terms and tentatively scheduled it for publication -- which gave me the push I needed to keep working on it '' .
What originally was a two-hundred-fifty-word photo-caption-job for `` Sports Illustrated '' grew to a novel-length feature story for `` Rolling Stone '' . Thompson said publisher Jann Wenner had `` liked the first 20 or so jangled pages enough to take it seriously on its own terms and tentatively scheduled it for publication -- which gave me the push I needed to keep working on it '' .