The Bushwhacked Piano (1971) falls into the category of the picaresque, as it follows the comical misadventures of a central character (Nicholas Payne) through a series of farcical events.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971) is a novel by the famous American journalist Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005). Its central themes are substance abuse, the 1960s countercultural movement, excess, and ruin.

Seymour Hirsch wrote The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), Nellie Bly wrote Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887), Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood (1965), and Helen Thomas wrote Front Row at the White House : My Life and Times (2000).

All of the alternative answer options were American literary journalists.

The Rum Diary (1998), The Curse of Lono (1983), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 (1973), and Hell’s Angels (1966) are all works by Hunter S. Thompson. Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a 1972 novel by Richard Bach.

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is one of the most famous novels by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012).

Cormac McCarthy wrote All the Pretty Horse (1992), Thomas McGuane wrote Nobody's Angel (1981), Robert A. Heinlein wrote The Number of the Beast (1980), and Ursula K. Le Guin wrote The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974).

The Bushwhacked Piano (1971) is one of American writer Thomas McGuane’s ten novels.

Cormac McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian (1985), Robert A. Heinlein wrote The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1968), Walker Percy wrote The Moviegoer (1961), and Hunter S. Thompson wrote Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966).

Like The Bushwhacked Piano (1971), John Kennedy Toole’s acclaimed 1980 novel A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel featuring a hapless young American man and a comedic set of misadventures.

Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy is a revisionist western, Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin is a collection of fantasy stories, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood is dystopian speculative fiction, and All the King’s Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren is political fiction.

The Moviegoer was first published in 1961.

The novel, McCullers’ first, was set in the 1930s and published in 1940.

The Ballad of the Sad Café is a 1951 collection containing a novella, poems, plays, and several short stories. (The rest of these titles belong to short stories by Southern writer Flannery O’Connor.)

Carson McCullers’ title is taken directly from Fiona Macleod’s 1896 poem “The Lonely Hunter.” This answer gives you a helpful clue to narrow down the answer choices: The poet must be Scottish. Dylan Thomas was Welsh, W.B. Yeats was Irish, and Mary Astell was English.