He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.

Thompson severed his ties with the Observer after his editor refused to print his review of Tom Wolfe's 1965 essay collection The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and he moved to San Francisco immersing himself in the drug and hippie culture that was taking root in the area. invasion of Grenada but would not discuss these experiences until the publication of Kingdom of Fear 20 years later. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.

He subsequently joined the United States Air Force before moving into journalism. Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18 1937 – February 20 2005) was an American author and journalist. The work he remains best known for is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1972) a rumination on the failure of the 1960s counterculture movement.