Michael Herr, whose non-fiction novel Dispatches exposed the ravages of the Vietnam War in the Seventies, has died in New York after a long illness. He was 76.

The Oscar nominee's Vietnam War memoir, about his time working as a war correspondent for Esquire magazine in Vietnam between 1967 to 1969, is considered a literary classic.

Author John le Carré previously described the literary work as “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.”

Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson also had high praise for the book. “We have all spent 10 years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived... but Michael Herr’s Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade,” he said.