Literary Figures With Crippling Drug Addictions:

Stephen King:       

               Stephen King is one of the powerhouses of horror fiction. From the time he began writing novels in 1967 through the present day, he’s churned out over 50 novels (that averages to over one per year for 46 straight years). If you want to call that a long-distance writing marathon, then the eight years between 1979 and about 1987 were a full-on sprint, when King sent a massive 22 novels to the publisher.

The difference? It’s hard to say, but it might have been all the cocaine. In his memoir, On Writing, King talks about how deep he really went into the addiction. And it wasn’t just cocaine—not long after he finished writing The Tommyknockers in 1986, his wife staged an intervention by pouring out a trashcan in front of him on the floor. It contained “beer cans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles and cocaine in plastic baggies, coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and NyQuil, even bottles of mouthwash.” He says he was so consistently wasted that he doesn’t remember writing Cujo.Faced with an ultimatum from his wife (“fix it or get out”), Stephen King went to rehab, sobered up in the late ’80s, and is still writing today.

John Keats:
 John Keats was a poet who lived at the turn of the 19th century, and despite having one of the most recognizable bodies of work of the era, he died of tuberculosis when he was only 25. It wasn’t until four years before his death that his first poem was published. His writing continued languidly without much success and suddenly, two years later, he began writing almost feverishly, creating his three most famous poems in the space of only a few months
. It turns out that that period at the beginning of 1819 was probably the time when the young poet was taking the most opium, giving him “opiate reveries” like the ones described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

 Of course, it’s not actually proven that Keats took opium at all in his later life, although he was given laudanum as a child and he spent a few years administering laudanum to his brother, who also died of tuberculosis. In any event, his poems Ode to a Nightingale and Ode to Indolence are considered to be a drastic departure from his earlier poems—which would make sense if he was falling into an opium addiction.

Philip K. Dick:              If there was an award for the most schizophrenically delusional writer in history, Philip K. Dick would have been one of the top contenders. His drug of choice—his “writer fuel”—was amphetamine: everything from crystal meth to dextroamphetamine (now used in Adderall). From nearly the beginning of his writing career, he became one of the many counterculture icons of the ’60s and ’70s and eventually turned his house into something of a commune for wayfaring drug addicts. Their behavior became part of the inspiration for the people in A Scanner Darkly.

Most of his books center around an inability to distinguish reality from psychosis: His science fiction came from a blurred line between his own reality and the thoughts parading through his head. He often raved about seeing a giant metallic face floating above him in the sky, and for a brief period he believed that he had become possessed by the spirit of the prophet Elijah. In 1971, Dick’s house was broken into by a burglar, and he spent the next 11 years spinning through conspiracy theories about who was behind it, alternating between secret police, the CIA, and fringe political groups.

Eventually, he decided that he must have been the burglar: He believed that he broke into his own house after being brainwashed by the government. In 1982, at the age of 54, Dick suffered two consecutive strokes that left him brain-dead. He died in the hospital five days later. His novels have since become the source material for nearly 20 films, including Minority Report, Total Recall, and Blade Runner.