10 Writers Who Wrote Famous Works While Wasted

An American classic like Cadillacs and jazz, the late Truman Capote’s diverse oeuvre gave the world the deliciously frothy Breakfast At Tiffany’s and the ‘non-fiction novel’ In Cold Blood, which created what we know today as the true crime genre.

The flamboyant Capote had been an inveterate drinker from childhood, claiming to be so excited by the act of writing that from the age of ten he needed a whisky to get to sleep at night (although given his wicked gift for self-mythologising, there’s a degree of uncertainty there).

In Cold Blood changed all of that. Capote’s compulsion to get to the truth of the story of the 1959 Clutter family murders in Kansas haunted him, as did his unexpected friendship with Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, the men convicted of the killings.

As time went on and the killers’ appeals continued, Capote found himself personally embroiled in the story but without an end to provide closure - to the work and to his relationship with it, and with Smith in particular.

His drinking worsened, now bolstered by a vicious cocaine habit, as the ongoing story preoccupied him awake and asleep. When the two murderers finally ran out of rope in 1965, they asked Capote to be there when they were hung: the writer watched Hickock swing, but ran out of the room before Smith’s turn.

He finally had his ending. In Cold Blood was an instant bestseller, and Capote became an even greater celebrity, but he would never be the same again.