Drug-fuelled fear and loathing on the insanity of America

Young reporters with literary delusions once looked up to grizzled veterans who arrived at work with hangovers and drank black coffee until they could nail the story and get back to the bar.

After the publication of Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga in 1966, many of those young hacks - mostly male - aspired to lose the story while a cocktail of hallucinogens competed for their minds.

Hunter Stockton Thompson made journalism sexy by becoming the story, seemingly reducing the American Dream, the US president and the winner of the Kentucky Derby to cameo roles.

Plenty of writers - including Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe - used reporting techniques in literature before Thompson. His mark was made when he accidentally took what Wolfe tagged new journalism to the extreme, 'gonzo' journalism.

The term emerged after his 1970 magazine piece The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved. Suffering from writer's block and chemical abuse, Thompson had barely seen a horse when deadline approached. He started filing his notes and was astonished to learn his editors had untangled a narrative.

He argued that the only sensible way to report the insanity of America was in a drug haze. Gonzo peaked in 1972 with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, whose point of view is established in the famous first sentence: 'We were somewhere near Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.'