Famous Alcoholic Writers Who Died of Alcoholism

He is also alleged to have used booze as a crutch to deal with misfortune. Yet despite all this, as an apparent „functional alcoholic,” Joyce continued to produce work that has been acclaimed as some of the best the 7 stages of alcohol intoxication of the 20th century, until his death from peritonitis in 1941. Elizabeth Bishop was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet and short-story writer often considered one of the finest poets of the 20th century.

• Whether it’s alcohol to numb the noise from the world or speed or LSD to “inspire” them, the bohemian yet lonely world of the writer or poet is a minefield.
• Good Raymond emerged from the wreckage slowly, like a man struggling from a sm ashed car.
• Sadly, more shame for Bishop came from being a lesbian during a period in which homosexuality was not accepted.
• Her most famous character, Tom Ripley, shares the paranoiac guilt and self-hatred of the alcoholic in his need to escape his inadequacies he echoes the quest for oblivion and escape in intoxication.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is practically the patron saint of all writers who were alcoholics. The defining author of the Jazz Age in the 1920s and 30s, Fitzgerald’s lifestyle closely mirrored those of the characters in his many successful novels like The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise. In fact, many critics 11 things people don’t tell you about growing up with an alcoholic parent have noted that Tender Is the Night is likely a thinly-veiled account of Fitzgerald’s own experience with alcoholism, financial struggles, and mental illness. Slowly, over the next two years, he backed away from his family, whose ongoing troubles he felt certain were capable of scuttling his recovery.

The tortured artist is something of a cliché, but these writers who were alcoholics reveal the sad truth behind the stereotype.

Three were profoundly promiscuous, and almost all experienced conflict and dissatisfaction with regard to their sexuality. Most died in middle age, and the deaths that weren’t suicides tended to be directly related to the years of hard and hectic living. At times, all tried in varying degrees to give up alcohol but only two succeeded, late in life, in becoming permanently dry. Many members of her family were alcoholics, including her father, who died when she was a baby. Bishop’s life was additionally marred by the kind of loss and physical insecurity often present in the family histories of addicts. Irish novelist and poet James Augustine Aloysius Joyce is regarded as one of the most influential writers of the modernist avant-garde.

A prolific writer, often turning out a story a week, he kept his real identity a secret as his fame as O. A failure at business, a spendthrift, and finally an alcoholic, he died in poverty on June 5, 1910. Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an author of crime stories and novels of immense stylistic influence upon modern crime fiction, especially in the style of the writing and the attitudes now characteristic of the genre. Chandler abused alcohol for the entire duration of his writing career. Many great writers of the 20th century struggled with addictions to alcohol.

Further reading on alcoholism and writing:

On October 7, 1849, at age 40, Poe died in Baltimore; the cause of his death is unknown and has been attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents. Duras’s nightmarish childhood raises the question of origins, of what causes alcohol addiction and whether it is different for men and women. Alcoholism is roughly 50% hereditable, a matter of genetic predisposition, which is to say that environmental factors such as early life experience and societal pressure play a considerable role. Picking through the biographies of alcoholic female writers, one finds again and again the same dismal family histories that are present in the lives of their male counterparts, from Ernest Hemingway to F Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams to John Cheever.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American writer of novels and short stories, whose works have been seen as evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he himself allegedly coined. Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s. On the night of December 20, 1940, he had a heart attack, and the next day, December 21, while awaiting a visit from his doctor, Fitzgerald collapsed and died. This American novelist and short story writer is the woman behind the famous 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. Patricia Highsmith is best known for her psychological thrillers, including her series of five novels based on the character Tom Ripley. Throughout her career, Highsmith wrote 22 novels and several short stories.

While not all of this statement is wholly to be believed, it’s true that Williams was by no means the only alcoholic writer in America, or anywhere else for that matter. These are among the greatest writers of our age, and yet, like Williams, their addiction to alcohol damaged their creativity, ravaged their relationships and drove many of them to death. In the magnificently unstable Good Morning, Midnight she shows precisely why such a woman might turn to drink, given limited options for work or love. At the same time, and like her near-contemporary Fitzgerald, she uses drunkenness as a technique of modernism.

Voices of Women in Recovery

Now, I don’t believe drinking myself mad would make me successful in any way. Here I am, finding it difficult to write a post on Medium because I had a few too many last night, and Stephen King wrote a best-selling novel in a state of blind alcoholism. We love being sold the legend of a great writer, drunk on creativity and wine. Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. One of Williams’ most enduring works, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, included references to elements of his life such as homosexuality, mental instability and alcoholism.

The voices of alcoholic women in recovery have some intimate and inspiring stories to share with the world. While we look at those who put their soul into their own stories and scripts, giving the world a look at the real and raw parts of their pain, we hope more female writers tell more stories of success and victory over addiction. Most of these women not only struggled with some form of depression or mental illness, but they also had to grapple with a world that undervalued and overlooked women. They battled with a world where all women were treated differently, especially women who drank. In fact, in many ways that world still exists, people just dress it up differently. But thankfully, even though many of them never escaped their addictions, they were able to lay their thoughts and feelings bear for the world to see.

Dorothy Parker, American satirist, was best known for her status as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, which was a group of New York City-based writers and critics. Though she considered herself merely a „wisecracker,” Parker’s talents as a writer are well-documented in her numerous New Yorker-published literary works and the two Academy Award nominations she received for screenwriting. Despite an early era of productivity, Parker’s alcohol abuse peaked in the 1950s, contributing to her divorce from her husband and causing her work to become increasingly erratic. By the 1960s, Parker was no longer writing anything notable, and she died in 1967 of a heart attack.

‘All he did was put up those bleeding posters’ – Dublin inner city laments departure of Michael Stone

Over the course of his life, John Berryman was hospitalized for alcohol abuse on multiple occasions. Ultimately, it was not the alcohol that killed him, however. With the glittering lifestyle that these writers led when they reached fame, it is unsurprising that they were confronted with the temptation that led to their disease. This list acknowledges the deaths of those great writers who died of alcoholism, along with their most famous works. He was by no means the only writer who used alcohol in this way. The same trick was employed by John Cheever, one of the greatest short-story writers of his or any century.

Hemingway is another great twentieth-century author who drank and drank thanks to a serious undiagnosed condition. Yeats was an Irish the effects of combining alcohol with other drugs poet who experimented quite vigorously with pot. His book Confessions of an English Opium Eater earned him widespread notoriety.

Some writers, including London, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett wrote about their respective drinking problems, while most did not. Born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1912, John Cheever saw the effects of alcohol abuse firsthand from an early age, as his father Frederick fell into heavy drinking after losing most of the family’s money. The writer himself had a 20-year addiction to alcohol – possibly intensified by struggles over his bisexuality – and tackled the subject in his 1962 short story Reunion, about a boy who meets with his estranged, alcoholic father in New York City. The so-called „Chekhov of the suburbs” continued to drink even after a near-fatal pulmonary edema attributable to his alcoholism. However, in 1975, after he found himself being picked up by the police for vagrancy while sharing liquor with some homeless people, Cheever was checked into New York’s Smithers Alcoholism Treatment and Training Center. He remained sober until his death of cancer seven years later at the age of 70.

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Again, a writer finding success in post-war America, Dorothy Parker was a poet, writer, and critic known for her sharp wit. She requested her gravestone read, „excuse the dirt.” Amongst many of her comedic quotes, she wrote, „I’m not a writer with a drinking problem, I’m a drinker with a writing problem.” Hemingway shared drinking sessions with famous alcoholic writers James Joyce and F. It was said that Joyce would get into arguments with strangers and call on Hemmingway to beat them up. Like Kerouac, he died young because of his alcohol addiction at age 44. He was part of the infamous 1920s group of writers and creatives living in Paris.

In July 1961, after being released from a mental hospital where he’d been treated for severe depression, he committed suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho with a shotgun. William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American novelist, film screenwriter, and poet whose works feature his native state of Mississippi. He is regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century and was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. It is now widely believed that Faulkner used alcohol as an “escape valve” from the day-to-day pressures of his regular life. Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist, writer, poet, and artist. Along with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, he is amongst the best known of the writers known as the Beat Generation.