Over the span of his forty-year career, his work has encompassed music, art, film, theater, literature, politics, biography, history, race, sociology, sexuality, and celebrity culture.
He specialized in oversized illustrated books that reflected his diverse interests like The Woody Guthrie Songbook and The Things I Love by Liberace, early examples of what would become a whole trend of “scrapbooks” in trade publishing.
In 1986, he published American Fool: The Roots and Improbable Rise of John ‘Cougar’ Mellencamp, a book-length portrait of the artist which charted his odyssey from Seymour, Indiana, through the music industry.
Duane Davis of the Rocky Mountain News compared the book to Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night.
As Torgoff appeared in The Drug Years and Sex as a principal commentator and narrator, he became a recognized TV personality and expert on the pop cultural landscape of the baby boom era.
Kirkus called the book "A comprehensive and compassionate account of the intersections of jazz, race, and drugs in 20th-century America...A textured story of human hope and hopelessness, of artistry that blossomed in the most daunting and, in some cases, demeaning circumstances.