A number of the writers and poets I have read and admired have also had alcohol/drugs as a companion. Women could give men a run for their money in the amount of alcohol they consumed. Prolific writers like Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jack Kerouac, Theodore Roethke, Dorothy Parker, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Jean Stafford and Carson McCullers all were enslaved to drink.
Some confessed that alcohol brought on their creative juices. Others drank to forget painful memories. Poet John Berryman was deeply affected by his father's suicide when he was twelve. Drink medicated that January day in 1972 when he threw himself off a bridge. Dorothy Parker, a screenwriter, critic and poet seems to have many watering holes wherever she lived or visited.
I often wonder what kind of work they would have written or produced if they hadn't been enslaved to drink drugs? Most of them had troubled and unhappy childhoods. The events that happened during those times shaped the way and the topics they wrote about. While all of them are gone, they left some great pieces of literature.
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