Honestly, the hardest thing about assembling a list of literature classics written while the author was drunk or high (or both) is choosing which works to leave out. The more you research this topic, the more surprising it seems that anything is ever written sober!
Hunter S. Thompson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs: Obvious choices, all. But did you know these other lit classics were also written under the influence?
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Stevenson wrote the first draft while bedridden from a hemhorrage, but rewrote the draft in a six-day drug-induced manic episode. Accounts are divided as to whether Stevenson was on cocaine or ergot.
Stephen King, Cujo
Stephen King's descent into alcoholism and cocaine addiction gradually built throughout the 1970s and 1980s. By the time he wrote Cujo, King's addiction problems were so bad that he has said (in his outstanding memoir/advice book On Writing) that he barely remembers writing it at all. It's a surprisingly coherent and enjoyable novel, for having been written entirely in a blackout.
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Widely considered one of Chandler's best novels, this classic noir detective mystery was written while Chandler attended to his wife, who was slowly dying of a terminal illness. As his wife's condition worsened, so did Chandler's clinical depression and alcoholism. After his wife finally died, Chandler's alcoholism increased as his writing quality decreased. Who knows what masterpieces Chandler may have left for us if he hadn't slowly drunk himself to death.
Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven
Poe's drinking problem was legendary. As with Chandler, the slow illness of Poe's wife from tuberculosis was the catalyst for a sharp uptick in his drinking. After his wife's death, Poe wrote and published The Raven. Just a few years later he was found, incoherent and delirious, on the streets of Baltimore, and died shortly thereafter.
Image courtesy Flickr/Proggie
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