This is a Maybe Day piece I had missed, but Modern Occultist published a good-sized article on RAW on July 23, discussing Wilson and several of his books. There is also discussion of Eric Wagner's An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson. Here is the intro:
On July 23, 1973, a former Playboy editor turned novelist sat in California running himself through a battery of yogic breathing exercises and ceremonial magic techniques he'd adapted from Aleister Crowley, trying to see what would happen if he took his own skepticism and set it down for a while.
Somewhere in the archive of human letters there is a category of writer who cannot be summarized. You can describe their books, chart their influences, document their controversies, quote their more memorable lines—and still the essential thing will have slipped away, grinning at you from behind the nearest conspiracy theory. Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) was that kind of writer. He was a novelist, a philosopher, a stand-up comedian, a chaos magician by temperament if not always by practice, and—in the formulation he most favored for himself in his last years—“a Damned Old Crank.” He was also, by any honest reckoning, one of the most genuinely liberating thinkers of the twentieth century, a man who devoted his entire career to the single project of helping people think more carefully about how little they actually know.

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