10 Writers Who Wrote Famous Works While Wasted

Renowned as both a horror icon and a pioneer of the genre of detective fiction, the legendary Edgar Allan Poe had a significant issue with alcohol for much of his life, losing more than one position of employment due to being too drunk to continue.

In the nineteenth century, a crippling addiction to alcohol was already fairly well understood: such a condition was referred to as ‘dipsomania’ rather than as alcoholism, and tended to refer to those poor souls who found themselves unable to live without drink but unable to function within society with drink.

Poe’s own dipsomaniacal tendencies worsened in 1842 when his beloved wife Virginia first began showing symptoms of consumption, that peculiarly Victorian affliction we know today as tuberculosis.

Over the course of Virginia’s illness Poe’s drinking became impossible to conceal, and he’d alienate more than one contemporary, famously publically accusing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism in 1845, the same year that The Raven was published.

The Raven instantly made Poe a household name, but Virginia never recovered, worsening over a period of five years until her death in the winter of 1847. Poe grew more and more unstable following her passing, and followed her in somewhat clouded circumstances in 1849 - he was found, delirious, wandering Baltimore, wearing clothes that did not belong to him, and died in hospital the next day.