Raoul Duke is the partially fictionalized author surrogate character and sometimes pseudonym used by Hunter S. Thompson as the main character and antihero for many of his works. He is perhaps best known as the narrator for his 1971 autobiographical novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The book was originally written under the name Raoul Duke. The character wears a bucket hat and yellow tinted aviator glasses. In Thompson's writings Duke is the main character and narrator of many of Thompson's stories, novels, and articles, often taking part in the events of Thompson's life in Thompson's place. He is portrayed as a cynical, mentally unbalanced, Gonzo journalist whose daily life is a near-perpetual state of intoxication on whatever drugs happen to be available - ranging from cannabis to amyl nitrite to adrenochrome - in an attempt to keep the spirit of the 1960s, a time which he speaks of romantically in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, alive within himself even as the rest of the country forgets it and what it represented. He usually obtains and consumes these substances in the company of his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, a "half-crazed 300 pound Samoan", whose drug-induced frenzies give even Duke pause. Thompson based Gonzo on his friend Oscar Zeta Acosta. Duke is first mentioned by Thompson in his 1966 book Hell's Angels, where he is described as an outlaw who does not break the law in an offensive way to society, but a way that in fact makes him more acceptable. Duke is often characterized as being somewhat of an author surrogate. His name, according to Thompson in interviews, was inspired by Raúl Castro and John Wayne's nickname "The Duke"; however, David S. Wills, in High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism, argues that he borrowed the name from a newspaper article during his research for Hell's Angels. Duke was also used so that Thompson could talk about himself – after a diving accident Thompson had to spend some time in a decompression chamber, and wrote a letter signed 'Raoul Duke' in which the pseudonym described the insanity of Thompson's condition in the chamber – holding up scrawled notes to the single glass window and ordering a television set to watch coverage of the Watergate hearings. The letter appeared in Rolling Stone in August 1973. In The Great Shark Hunt (a large selection of articles written by