McKeen has written and/or edited a dozen books, including Outlaw Journalist (W.W. Norton, 2008), his critically acclaimed biography of writer Hunter S. Thompson.
McKeen's most recent book is Everybody Had An Ocean (Chicago Review Press, 2017), a non-fiction narrative about music and mayhem in Los Angeles in the Sixties.
His writing has appeared in Maxim, American History, Holiday, The Saturday Evening Post and many other newspapers and magazines.
Wayne Curtis, writing in the Wall Street Journal, called the book "a romp" and said McKeen had committed "deft storytelling.
In the Washington Post, book editor Jonathan Yardley wrote that McKeen "gets it all in: the boozing and drugging, the violence, but also the intelligence, the loyalty, the inherent decency."