An American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate. His first novel was The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948. His best work was widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, which was published in 1979, and for which he won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes. His book Armies of the Night was awarded the National Book Award.

Along with the likes of Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, he is considered an innovator of creative non-fiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the style and devices of literary fiction onto fact-based journalism.