7 Great Works Of Literature (Written While Wasted)

Stephen King's alcohol abuse is pretty well-known, as it's a strong theme in much of his early work. Perhaps less known is how, after he finally quit drinking, he dove headlong into coke, and not the kind that you mix with bourbon.

If King's entire 1970s repertoire came from the bottom of the bottle, then his '80s body of work was snorted off a mirror. For example, The Tommyknockers is a novel about a mysterious force that makes people more powerful, intelligent, and creative, but gradually transforms them into monsters the more they indulge in it. This is an appropriate theme for a book that was written by a guy with pupils the size of Spanish olives and tissues stuffed up both nostrils to stem the voluminous bleeding caused by all the "inspiration dust" he was snorting.

Coke might have been the fuel behind some of King's most celebrated work -- Misery, for example, was written at the height of his addiction -- but it also produced some amazing garbage. The Tommyknockers is one of his most critically panned books. And his first and only effort as a film director, 1986's Maximum Overdrive, about trucks that come to life and try to flatten Emilio Estevez, has gone down in notoriety as something you'd less expect from the master of the American novel and more like a movie based on the transcript of a maladjusted six-year-old playing with his Hot Wheels collection.

King admits that the movie's legendary badness has a lot to do with the fact that he was "coked out of [his] mind all through production, and didn't know what [he] was doing." He's clean now, but the existence of Maximum Overdrive is enough of a blight on King's life that he's sworn off filmmaking forever, deciding that making terrible movies out of his work is a job best left to other people.

"You're going to try to make a movie out of my short story about a Rita Hayworth poster? Yeah, let me know how that works out."

Not that King is the first horror author to draw inspiration from mood-altering chemicals ...

The common story behind Mary Shelley's The Modern Prometheus (or Frankenstein, if you're not an asshole) is that Shelley, her husband Percy, and their pal Lord Byron went on a camping trip with some other writer friends in which they invented horror stories over a log fire. The story Shelley came up with, about a mad scientist reanimating a corpse, was so goddamn cool that Percy urged her to publish it. This is more or less true, but the common account leaves out one crucial element: Like most camping trips, the one in which Shelley conceived of Frankenstein involved taking all of the drugs in the goddamned universe.

There's a suggestion that Shelley and her fellow literary friends were messed up on laudanum, an opium tincture that you could buy in a freaking drug store until the FDA ruined it for everyone. Those who recounted the nights that they camped in a cabin in Geneva recall that Percy Shelley got so fucked up that, while Byron was reading from a book of spooky poems, he leapt to his feet and started screaming that Mary's nipples had turned into eyes.

After calming Percy down from his bad trip, Lord Byron proposed that they should all write ghost stories to tell each other the next night, because as we've previously discussed, Lord Byron was crazy and didn't care too much about Percy's well-being. Mary Shelley retired and had an opium dream about a reanimated corpse that would become the basis for the story which would eventually inspire I, Frankenstein.

"I was tripping balls. What's their excuse?"

Over the following years, the attendees of this one drug-fueled camping trip went on to give birth to much of 19th-century literature. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, her husband became the accomplished poet behind Ozymandias, Lord Byron wrote Don Juan, and attendee John Polidori wrote The Vampyre, the precursor to Dracula, which is probably why you haven't heard of him. All in all, it seems we owe an awful lot of our literary heritage to a drug that we aren't allowed to buy anymore.

So it would appear that opium has pulled way ahead of cocaine on the literature scoreboard, but we can't count out coke yet, damn it! After all ...

Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde gave us one of literature's most enduring characters. It's a story about a man who creates an addictive substance that makes him Hulk out into a violent asshole, which technically means that Stevenson created two enduring characters. Unsurprisingly, the famous novel about an unassuming man taking drugs to transform into a locomotive rage beast owes its existence to the legendary amount of cocaine Stevenson was using at the time.

Stevenson spent his adult life suffering from the effects of tuberculosis, for which his doctor prescribed cocaine, because doctors back then were fucking awesome. The white rabbit wound up giving Stevenson a crippling addiction, but it also endowed him with a superhuman writing stamina -- he cranked out the first draft for Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, all 30,000 freaking words of it, in only three days while coked to the gills. Someone needs to send George R. R. Martin six or seven bricks of booger sugar as soon as possible.

However, this initial draft fell afoul of Stevenson's harshest critic: his wife Fanny, who supposedly burned it after declaring it "utter nonsense." Stevenson absorbed his wife's criticism, railed a few more lines, and wrote a second draft completely from memory. Another 30,000 words in three days. And remember, this was back in the days when novelists wrote everything in longhand with a feather quill by candlelight.

This second version won Fanny's approval and thus survived the Stevenson family fireplace to become one of the 19th century's most acclaimed novels. Which, again, was the result of two complete drafts written in less than one week by a man who was stratospherically high. We assume the majority of Miami Vice episodes were written in this fashion.

By the time she finally found a new publisher, Rand was afraid of getting dropped again if she took too long to complete the novel. So she turned to Benzedrine, an amphetamine that was basically the early-20th-century legal equivalent of meth.

Over the next 12 months, Rand cranked out her manuscript, gliding through hundreds of thousands of words on a cloud of pure speed. But The Fountainhead was only the opening band for the epic Atlas Shrugged, one of the longest and densest novels in the English language, which was going to require even more obsessive planning (read: meth). By the time she put pen to paper for her masterwork, Rand's Benzedrine addiction was already making her aggressive, prone to mood swings, irritable, and paranoid.

Atlas Shrugged hit the shelves in 1957 as 645,000 words of narcotic-induced paranoid crazy, and would go on to become one of the most influential novels of all time, and a trilogy of the boring-est movies ever produced.

"Caffeine?" you say with a scoff, "I drink five Red Bulls a day, where's my Cracked article?" Yeah, sorry, but you're not even close. Voltaire was so addicted to caffeine that his face belongs on the front of every Starbucks in the world. We're talking about 30 cups of coffee a day ... and sometimes more than twice that.

His consumption increased whenever he was working on something he considered important. His most famous work, the novel Candide, was written over five months and powered by so much caffeine that an overnight trucker would scream in horror at what the man was pouring into his body. It's reported that during the writing of Candide, Voltaire would average somewhere between 50-70 cups of coffee a day. That's like one cup every ten minutes, without breaking to eat. At that rate, it's amazing that he was able to continue writing, and not start scrambling around his neighborhood on all fours, spraying pedestrians with a constant stream of urine and feral hissing.

This kind of lifestyle might sound like the surest recipe for a chest-detonating heart attack, but Voltaire lived to the ripe old age of 83 and died gently in his sleep. It was probably the first time he truly slept in his whole life, so the weight of all those frenzied restless years collapsed in on him like a dynamited mine shaft.

Sartre was kind of a celebrity in his time, which is impressive for anyone whose job consists entirely of the word "philosopher." Nevertheless, it was a different era, and Sartre's groundbreaking book The Critique Of Dialectic Reason, a work that required almost as much narcotics to write as it does to understand it, had a profound influence on a diverse group of people, from Jackson Pollock to J.D. Salinger to Fidel freakin' Castro. Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but became the only person to ever refuse the award, because he was a drug addict, and that is a thing that a drug addict would do.

Burnt out on too much work, too little sleep, too much wine and cigarettes, and the burden of his famously depressing worldview, Sartre (whose most famous quote is "Hell is other people") needed a way to even out his schedule. So he took a daily cocktail of barbiturates, including Corydrane, a mixture of amphetamines and aspirin that won't eliminate headaches so much as make you not care that you're having them.

The prescribed dose of Corydrane was one or two tablets in the morning, with perhaps another at lunch if he was in the middle of some particularly deep existential funk. Sartre heroically wound up eating them like peanuts, because existential funks were his beat. While penning The Critique, he was chewing around 20 pills a day, which makes The Critique doubly impressive, because he probably couldn't feel his arms while he was writing it.

For his first year at the University of Bonn, he was co-president of the "Tavern Club," during what his father described as a period of "wild rampaging," a phrase here meaning "engaging in drunken pistol duels and riding donkeys while intoxicated."

Friedrich Engels wasn't exactly foreign to the concept of boozing up, either. While Marx was playing DUI Donkey across the countryside, Engels was sampling France's vineyards. He was "more or less squiffy all the time" which we assume means drunk, but could also just mean French. One of his biographers remarks that reading Engels' diary is like reading a J. Peterman catalog of really expensive wine.

So when Marx and Engels first got together, it was absolutely over drinks. They met at the Cafe de la Regence, but they weren't wasting anyone's time by ordering coffee. In fact, the hangout session in which they put together their plans for The Communist Manifesto has been described as a beer-soaked, ten-day bender, a binge so spectacular that its hangover was the Cold War.

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For more things drugs and alcohol gave us, check out The 5 Greatest Things Ever Accomplished While High and 6 Historic Events You Didn't Realize Everyone Was Drunk For.

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