10 Writers Who Wrote Famous Works While Wasted

The greatest and most prolific horror writer who ever lived, Stephen King has been very open about the drug and alcohol problems that have plagued him over the years.

He’d been drinking heavily since he was a teenager, but - at least at first - that was all it was. The income of a teacher and struggling writer wasn’t enough to indulge anything more than a case of beer here and there.

That changed with the runaway success of Carrie. As more and more of his subsequent novels were optioned by Hollywood, he’d be invited to the kind of parties where cocaine was served along with the hors d’oeuvres.

King had always had a degree of control with the drinking, but with coke it was different: if he was awake, he was on coke. As the seventies lurched sketchily into the eighties, King’s writing and his cocaine habit were inseparable - the one fuelled the other, like snakes eating each others tails. That loss of control spread to the booze, and King found himself scrounging for mouthwash for the alcohol content.

Published in 1981, Cujo - a novel about a rabid St. Bernard dog - was written at the height of his addiction: King barely remembers writing any of it, and his wife would regularly find him passed out at a typewriter spattered with vomit, bloody cotton-wool plugging his nose.

Incredibly, King wouldn’t clean up for another decade: 1991’s Needful Things is the first novel he ever wrote fully, horrifyingly sober.