Authors Like Hunter S. Thompson

Wolfe and Thompson are the two poles of the same movement. Where Thompson surrendered to the chaos he was reporting on, Wolfe stayed a meticulous stylist even at his wildest — white suit, notebook, total command of the sentence. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test covers the same psychedelic underground, and even crosses paths with the Hells Angels, so it is the natural next book after Fear and Loathing.

The voice is the most recognisably Thompson's of anyone on this list: profane, furious, very funny and backed by real reporting. Taibbi aims it at banks and modern campaigns rather than at Nixon, and he is less interested in himself as a character than Thompson was — the rage is pointed outward. Start with Griftopia.

Didion shares Thompson's core conviction — that objectivity is a fiction and the writer's own perception is the only honest instrument — and reaches it through restraint instead of excess. Her Haight-Ashbury in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is the same San Francisco Thompson wrote about, seen by someone who stays sober and very still. For readers who want the method without the noise.

Mailer is the clearest precedent for Thompson's central trick: turning the reporter into a flawed character the reader has to evaluate rather than simply trust. Mailer does it in the third person, Thompson behind the name Raoul Duke, but both put their own vanity, fear and appetite on the page as evidence. Read The Armies of the Night to see where the idea came from before Thompson took it somewhere stranger.

Herr takes Thompson's argument — that subjective experience is more honest than false neutrality — to the one subject where the stakes of getting it wrong are highest. Dispatches is fragmented, hallucinatory and drenched in rock music and drugs, like Thompson, but the fear in it is real combat rather than a rented convertible in Las Vegas. It is the most serious book on this list.

O'Rourke proves the gonzo voice is not owned by one politics: the same swagger, the same self-implication and the same comic fearlessness, put to a libertarian-conservative argument. Thompson in Las Vegas and O'Rourke in Beirut are recognisably the same kind of reporter. Read him for the method pointed somewhere else.

Wallace sent on assignment is Thompson's method with the drugs replaced by anxiety: the reporter dropped into an American spectacle and reporting chiefly on what it does to his own nerves. “Up, Simba” is the obvious pairing with Campaign Trail ’72 — another long, digressive ride on a presidential campaign for Rolling Stone — and the cruise essay is his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Plimpton's participatory method is Thompson's immersion without the menace: he gets inside the story by trying to do the job rather than by chasing danger. The joke is always on himself, which makes him the gentlest and funniest writer on this list, and a good one for readers who loved Thompson's sports writing.

Capote and Thompson both insist that a true story can use every technique fiction has, but where Thompson puts himself in the frame, Capote disappears into his subjects almost completely. Read him for the other way immersive non-fiction can work — not the writer as character, but the writer as someone who got disturbingly close — and for the arguments about accuracy that the method has never escaped.

The fiction to read if what you loved in Thompson was the motion: a car, a friend who is a force of nature, America going past at speed, and a narrator half in love with the chaos. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is in many ways On the Road rewritten for the end of the sixties, with the innocence gone; read them together.