Writers Who Did Their Best Work While High on Drugs
- Photo: Tom Palumbo / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0The mythology surrounding Jack Kerouac's most famous work, On the Road, is that he wrote it in a non-stop three week period. Which is sort of true. But the thing historians tend to shy away from is that Kerouac was taking benzadrine (basically speed) in order to fuel his writing. This was a nasty habit that would follow him to his death.MoreĀ Jack Kerouac
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- Photo: Greenleaf Publishing / Wikimedia Commons / Public DomainThere are two different Philip K. Dicks: pre-LSD PKD and post-LSD PKD. He always took massive amounts of amphetamines in order to fuel his word count (in the days of pulp science fiction, authors were paid by the word count and the more drugs you took the more you could type), but once he finally tried LSD and other hallucinogenics, he opened and his mind and began to write his most immersive and popular work.MoreĀ Philip K. Dick
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- Photo: Mark Paulin / Wikimedia Commons / Public DomainIn order to finish her masterwork, The Fountainhead, Rand turned to Benzedrine and finished one chapter a week. She continued to take the drug for the next three decades, so now we know what to blame for Atlas Shrugged.MoreĀ Ayn Rand
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Admittedly, Bukowski didn't take "drugs" per se, but for most of his adult life he never stopped drinking, and as just about any high school Health teacher will tell you, alcohol is a drug, too. At the height of his alcoholism he wrote such seminal works as Love Is a Dog From Hell and Hot Water Music.
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- Photo: Chuck Patch / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0Heroin is so synonymous with William Burroughs that's it feels weird telling people he took drugs. In fact, Burroughs was on and off junk so often it's shocking that he lived into his eighties. But back to the heroin, he was injecting it steadily throughout the '50s while he worked on Junkie and Naked Lunch.MoreĀ William S. Burroughs
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- Photo: Steve Anderson / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0Of all the writers on this list, Thompson probably took the most drugs. In fact, there was even a schedule for his drug intake that made its way into his biography. His daily habit included everything from orange juice, to cocaine and Halcion.MoreĀ Hunter S. Thompson
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- Photo: Government Press Office / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0For a guy whose job title was "philosopher," Sartre was pretty wild. Rather than walk around in a robe scratching his chin and wondering about death or whatever, Sartre used a chemical cocktail of everything from Benzedrine to mescaline (a psychedelic that really freaks you out). The best story about Sartre's love of taking psychedelics involves taking so much mescaline that he started seeing crabs everywhere.MoreĀ Jean-Paul Sartre
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- Stephen King, the master of horror, has been open about not only his alcohol abuse, which was the basis for The Shining, but also his heavy cocaine use that lasted from 1978 to 1986. Despite some of his best material coming out in that time frame, he openly admits that his final book written while cruising the snowy highway, The Tommyknockers, is one of his worst.MoreĀ Stephen King
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning gets a bad wrap when it comes to the world of poetry. She was born too early to be a peer of generations of depressed babe poets like Emily Dickens or even Sylvia Plath, and her work can be hard to get into if you don't know the best inroads (The Seraphim and Other Poems isn't a bad place to start).
But Browning could party as hard as any 20th century poet. In fact, she took any chance she could to get zonked out on opium, which was pretty easy to do in Victorian England.- #222 of 508 onThe 500+ Best Writers of All Time
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- Photo: Arnold Genthe / Wikimedia Commons / Public DomainYes, Aleister Crowley was more of a mystic/cult leader than anything else, but he wrote a bunch of books and plays that were all about his attachments to mysticism and his love affair with heroin (and even a few lesser drugs). He first came across heroin when it was prescribed for his bronchitis, and, until his death in 1947, he went out of his way to convince his friends and followers to become more magical with the help of drugs.MoreĀ Aleister Crowley
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- Photo: William Hilton / Wikimedia Commons / Public DomainKeats is quite possibly the rubric for what we think of when we think of a poet: frail, beautiful, and lost in a day dream. It just so happens that Keats's daydream was caused by opium rather than a beatific love of nature. A recent biography of Keats states that his most prolific time as a writer (1819) was also when he was laying low with Mama Opium.MoreĀ John Keats
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- Photo: Grlucas / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0Norman Mailer is most well-known for his counter culture essays, and co-founding The Village Voice, but he was also a raging drug addict who had to take a mixture of Seconal, Benzedrine, and tranquilizers (along with coffee and booze) to even get going. But once he did he was unstoppable.MoreĀ Norman Mailer
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In 1955, after writing Brave New World, Aldous Huxley began to experiment liberally with LSD and mescaline, inspiring him to write the mind-altering book, The Doors of Perception. In the novella, Huxley details a day in his life after taking mescaline, and the results are effing bonkers.
He continued to take LSD and mescaline until he died of cancer in 1963, when he asked his wife to inject him with LSD on his deathbed. It's ironic that someone who railed against using drugs to numb the pain of every day life would decide to take up drug use as a sport, but stranger things have happened.MoreĀ Aldous Huxley- Dig Deeper...The Best Aldous Huxley Quotes
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- Photo: John Watson Gordon / Wikimedia Commons / Public DomainIf you've got Hunter S. Thompson posters covering your dorm room wall, you've got Thomas De Quincey to thank for that. His collection of personal essays, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, essentially introduced the concept of drug addiction to the western world. Unfortunately, despite his seminal work pushing him into the national spotlight, he struggled with addiction for most of his and he wouldn't gain financial stability until very late in life.
- Photo: David Shankbone / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0Jim Carroll may be one of the truest poets to commit pen to paper. It's unfortunate that his heroin addiction is the reason his work had the uncanny bite that it did, but without it we'd never have collections like Organic Trains, or The Book of Nods to read on lazy afternoons. Carroll began using while he was still in middle school (his journals of this time were adapted into the film The Basketball Diaries) and he battled with drugs for most of his life. He died alone in 2009 while writing in his apartment.MoreĀ Jim Carroll
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