99 Writers Who Were Alcoholics, Drunks, Addicted To Booze, Etc.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald*
- Ernest Hemingway*
- Dorothy Parker
- Jean Rhys
- Jean Stafford
- Aeschylus*
- Charles Bukowski
- Norman Mailer
- Stephen King*
- Lord Byron
- Anne Sexton*
- Percy Shelley
- Graham Greene
- Samuel Coleridge*
- William Faulkner
- J.D. Salinger
- Edgar Allen Poe*
- Samuel Johnson
- Raymond Carver
- David Foster Wallace
- Mary Karr
- Zelda Fitzgerald
- Malcolm Lowry*
- Dylan Thomas*
- Elizabeth Wurtzel
- Robert Benchley
- John Cheever
- Tennessee Williams
- William Butler Yeats
- Li Po*
- Shirley Jackson
- Edward Albee
- O. Henry
- James Joyce
- Frederick Exley
- Harry Crews
- Oscar Wilde
- Grace Metalious
- Julie Powell
- Alan Watts
- James Frey*
- Lester Bangs
- Patrick Hamilton
- Tom Lux
- Martin Amis*
- L. Ron Hubbard*
- Christopher Hitchens
- Hunter S. Thompson
- James Thurber
- Raymond Chandler
- Patricia Highsmith
- Kingsley Amis
- Philip Larkin
- Truman Capote
- Carson McCullers
- Philip K. Dick
- Oliver Goldsmith
- Christopher Marlowe*
- Jacqueline Susann
- Flann O’Brian
- Edna St. Vincent Millay*
- Maeve Brennan*
- William S. Burroughs*
- Robert Lowell
- Adela Rogers St. John
- William Golding
- Jack London
- Stephen Crane
- Evelyn Waugh
- Hart Crane*
- Sylvia Plath
- Delmore Schwartz
- Herman Melville
- Djuana Barnes
- Theodore Roethke
- Thomas De Quincy
- Pete Hamill
- David Carr
- Caroline Knapp
- Augusten Burroughs
- Allen Tate
- Richard Yates
- Sinclair Lewis*
- Sherwood Anderson
- Eugene O’Neill
- John O’Hara
- Ring Launder
- Benjamin Franklin
- Charles Cros
- Koren Zailackas
- Caroline Gordon
- Conrad Aiken
- John Berryman*
- Edmund Wilson
- Joaquin Miller
- Rabelais*
- Rimbaud
- Verlaine
- Baudelaire…*
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*…This whole long list kinda makes you think, don’t it? …Anyway, Fitzgerald drank himself to death at around age forty. At his funeral, his friend (and fellow alcoholic) Dorothy Parker showed up and said “The poor son of a bitch” over his grave; the same words said over Gatsby’s grave in The Great Gatsby.
*This is obviously only a (very) partial list. There are many more alcoholic writers, duh, but I ran out of time to do research. …So, back to trivia! Hemingway’s favorite drink was a daiquiri, which is surprisingly wussy for a “man’s man” like Hem. But daiquiris were a new drink at the time, just introduced from exotic Cuba. So it’s sort of the equivalent of him liking the trendy chocolate martini o’ the month, or something. He died by shooting himself, after first trying to kill himself by walking into the propeller of a plane. Alcohol; good times!
*Aeschylus has the honor of being the first recorded alcoholic writer in history, circa 525 B.C. He wrote the following: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
*Stephen King was also a hu-uuuuge drug addict. He has said he doesn’t remember writing ‘The Shining’ because he was on so much coke at the time.
*Anne Sexton also committed incest with her own daughter. Um, yuck!
*Coleridge: also an opium addict, which is how ‘Kubla Khan‘ got written.
*Poe was discovered on the streets of Baltimore, drunk, disheveled, starving, freezing, and wearing clothes that were not his own. “He could not explain how he came to be in such a condition.” He died several days later.
*Malcolm Lowry was apparently one of the worst alcoholics in the history of ever, according to his friends; doing things like drinking toxic shaving lotion and such. He died during a drunken fall down an elevator shaft (I think?). I may have gotten that wrong; at a certain point, I didn’t want to spoil this with too much research.
*Dylan Thomas actually died from being given the wrong medicine in a hospital, but he was such an alcoholic that everyone just assumed he had died from booze. …That same night, he had “attempted to break the world record for the number of whiskies drunk in Manhattan.” Seriously.
*The poet Li Po supposedly died while drunkenly leaning over a boat in the moonlight to stare at his reflection in the water; and then drowning, obviously — but this is almost certainly, almost definitely apocryphal.
*James Frey’s ‘A Million Little Pieces’ is one of the worst books ever written! And not just because it’s fake; mostly because he’s such an incredibly terrible writer.
*Martin and Kingsley Amis are our only father/son pair on this list. (Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald are the only husband/wife pair.) They are also one of the only father/son pairs of novelists in history. It’s very rare. Dumas fils and Dumas père are the only others that come to mind.
*L. Ron Hubbard: liar, tax cheat, drug addict, founder of Scientology, and alumni of my undergraduate college (George Washington University). Whooo! Great.
*Marlowe was stabbed in the eye while drinking in a tavern. His last words– well, word — was “Christ!” and he then died instantly. He is the only writer who Shakespeare ever quoted, which is pretty damn good.
*Edna St. Vincent died from a drunken fall down her own staircase. She was also pretty hot, if you’re into that sort of thing with your female poets. Not that good an actual poet, though.
*Maeve Brennan was a part-time model, and even hotter than Millay. Also she was an incredible writer. She was such a drunk by the end that she was reduced to sleeping in the bathroom of The New Yorker, where she had once worked.
*William S. Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife while playing a drunken game of “William Tell” — i.e., shooting an object off the top of her head with a revolver. His wife may have wanted to be shot, though. The whole story is kind of confusing.
*Hart Crane is of no relation to Stephen Crane. He died at a ridiculously young age, jumping off a ferry in New York and drowning. He could apparently only write when drunk.
*I don’t know much about Sinclair Lewis, except that my very minor research revealed that he was also an incredibly awful alcoholic, similar to Malcolm Lowry, doing bizarre things like drinking hair tonic or anything whatsoever that contained alcohol.
*John Berryman killed himself by jumping off a bridge. The only witness was a carpenter named Art Hitman (of all things). According to Hitman: “He just leaned right over, and dropped right off [the bridge]. He never paused or looked back for a single second.” I have no idea why I know these facts.
*All of Rabelais’s writing is basically about getting drunk.
*Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, I get them mixed up from time to time. Most or all of them were “into” absinthe, the “green devil,” which also of course contains a small amount of poison. Anyway; enough trivia! The end! 
