BEST WRITERS WITH ADDICTION DEMONS
HUNTER S THOMPSON
Thompson’s name is synonymous with new journalism, in which the writers made themselves the subject of the story. He started early with the debauchery: by his early teens, he had already launched his life of drinking, vandalism, and pyromania that would turn him into a best-selling writer. At 18, he was jailed for robbery. In 1970, while covering the Kentucky Derby, Thompson went on a week-long bender and developed severe writer’s block. He handed his scrawled notes to the copy boys his editors sent after him, and the result, The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, was hailed as a landmark in journalism. The style was dubbed ‘gonzo’, for its wild, careening style. In 1971, Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas became a bestseller, as did his 1972 Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, about the Nixon-McGovern presidential election. Thompson died in his seventies of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
WILLIAM S BURROUGHS
Along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Burroughs founded the Beat Generation, the 1950s movement that developed new ways of writing about sex, drugs and creativity, and paved the way for the counter-culture of the 1960s. Burroughs’s best-known novel, Naked Lunch (1959), follows a heroin addict as he travels round the US, Mexico, Morocco and a fictional totalitarian state; it was controversial for its graphic depictions of drug use and gay sex. Like most of Burroughs’s fiction, Naked Lunch is semi-autobiographical.
STEPHEN KING
An insecure child, plagued by anxieties, King feared everything from falling down the toilet pipes to clowns and deformity. He developed a paranoia about death. As he grew older, he discovered that he was only able to deal with these horrors in his mind through writing about them. Unfortunately, alcohol and drugs would also become a part of his coping and entwined with his writing practice. He began taking drugs such as speed and LSD. About a month before his graduation, King was arrested after binge drinking at a nearby bar for stealing traffic cones. Such an arrest seems innocent; however, this was a warning of the more concerning behaviour to come. After finding success with Carrie, he waged a battle with cocaine and alcohol, which was only ended after the intervention of his wife and family.