Famous Writers Who Were Alcoholics

Sadly, many, many famous writers were alcoholics. A few were also addicted to various drugs. Many of them died early of cirrhosis and other alcohol-related diseases. This reminds us that alcohol not only caused much misery for the authors themselves and their families and friends, but also deprived us all of the literature they would likely have written if they had not been battling alcoholism, and if they had not died earlier than they likely would have otherwise. There have been various studies done, and much speculation, about why such a large proportion of writers have been alcoholic; there do not seem to be any clear answers to the question. The theory that alcohol and/or drugs sometimes actually fueled the writing has been pretty much discredited, Coleridge aside. Below is a partial list of famous writers who were known to be alcoholic. It is an astonishing roll call of some of the greatest writers of the past century or so.

James Agee
Kingsley Amis
Sherwood Anderson
James Baldwin
John Berryman
Richard Brautigan
Charles Bukowski
Truman Capote
Raymond Carver
Raymond Chandler
John Cheever
Stephen Crane
William Faulkner
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dashiell Hammett
Ernest Hemingway
O. Henry
James Joyce
Jack Kerouac
Arthur Koestler
Ring Lardner
Sinclair Lewis
Jack London
Robert Lowell
Malcolm Lowry
Norman Mailer
Eugene O’Neill
Dorothy Parker
Edgar Allen Poe
Theodore Roethke
Francois Sagan
Delmore Schwartz
Anne Sexton
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Jean Stafford
William Styron
Dylan Thomas
Paul Verlaine
Tennessee Williams
Edmund Wilson
Elinor Wylie