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". He had first submitted a 2,500 word manuscript to "Sports Illustrated" that was "aggressively rejected".