Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S Thompson
By William McKeen
Aurum £9.99, 428 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.99

After a reverential opening, McKeen’s biography charts Hunter Thompson’s belligerent rise from delinquent youth to iconoclastic journalist. A sports reporting role in the US Air Force whetted his appetite for egocentric writing but failed to curb the hefty drug and booze intake that fuelled his unruly personality.

Tom Wolfe once praised Thompson’s “manic, highly adrenal, first person style” which, after an outrageous account of the 1970 Kentucky Derby, was christened “Gonzo” – a searing, hallucinatory offshoot of the emerging New Journalism’s participatory reportage.

The way he inhabited a story forged the Thompson legend. He spent a year riding with San Francisco’s outlaw motorcycle gangs, which he distilled into his bestselling 1967 debut, Hell’s Angels; his drugs spree at a narcotics convention, immortalised in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is infamous.