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7 hard-drinking writers every man needs to read

7 hard-drinking writers every man needs to read

  • 7 hard-drinking writers every man needs to read

    Bruce Tuten, Flickr

    Back in the distant past — roughly twenty to thirty million years ago — something called the “book” was all the rage. Between inventing fire and hunting wildebeests, men apparently found time to relax by reading these “books.” And in those pages, they discovering the thoughts of “authors” - incredible men who stayed up late into the night, pounding their fingers into typewriters, crushing their eightieth cigarette into ash trays, and downing their ninth tumbler of scotch. This was all before they’d head out for the night. They laid down the tracts for modern drinking, and they’ve got a huge amount to show us. Here are seven of the greats.

    Photo credit: Bruce Tuten, Flickr -Mike Gillis

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  • 7 Ernest Hemingway

    Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. More than almost any other writer, Ernie embodied the masculine ideal. He was rugged guy, a resistance fighter, one of the most revered authors of his time, and, of course, an outstanding drunk. Each of his novels seem to extol spirits in some way — from the booze-fueled fistfights in The Sun Also Rises to the absinthe-gulping interludes in For Whom The Bell Tolls. And that was definitely fiction imitating life. "Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters," he wrote, and he earned that motto. Cheers to that.

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  • 6 Raymond Chandler

    The Duke of Detective Novels, Chandler made and perfected the cool persona of the antsy, witty gumshoe through the character of Philip Marlowe. With the help of his own past as a detective and an endless shower of gin gimlets, Chandler produced some of the most memorable mysteries ever. The only time his talents ran dry was when the booze did, and in that case he had a contract written up that gave him endless gin, an army of secretaries, and doctors to keep him awake. A true inspiration.

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  • 5 F. Scott Fitzgerald

    “Sometimes I wish I’d went through those good times stone cold sober so I could remember everything,” Fitzgerald once said. “But then again, if I had been sober the times probably wouldn’t have been worth remembering.” Maybe the greatest drunk writer in the history of American literature, Fitzgerald’s prose oozes with the excitement of decadent parties and their subsequent colossal hangovers, and he has the experience to back it up. Famously, when he went to Dartmouth College to write a script, he arrived already on a 24-hour champagne bender, went out to the frats, never wrote a single page, and reappeared two days later in New York, jobless.

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  • 4 Kurt Vonnegut

    “I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone," Vonnegut said. That quote sums up Kurt Vonnegut’s writing and relation with booze: An aid to get him into a hilarious, sad, and infinitely sarcastic place. Not only did he reveal the human condition in a biting and relatable way in books like Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions, though, Vonnegut also knew how to handle a less than ideal situation. Case in point: During his brief stint as a writer at Sports Illustrated, Vonnegut had to write a boring story about a racing horse that jumped over a fence. After fretting about it all day, he just typed “The horse jumped over the fucking fence” on a blank page and split.

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  • 3 Mark Twain

    “Sometimes too much to drink is hardly enough,” Twain said, likely before downing a bottle of homemade whiskey, shooting an elephant gun at the sky, and hopping a steamboat down the Mississippi. Okay…maybe not. But the man knew how to live — drinking, smoking, downing oysters, and in general blowing minds continuously with his wit in works like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Huck Finn, and Little Bessie.

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  • 2 Hunter S. Thompson

    Sure, tequila, rum, and a case of beer were only a few of the drugs in Thompson’s car when he pulled into Las Vegas (there were also “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline…and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers”), but throughout his life, alcohol more than any other drug defined his work. Whether that was in the adventurous gem The Rum Diary, the mad rambling of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or simply recounting the time he adopted an alcoholic monkey in Brazil, the man knew how to drink, plain and simple.

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  • 1 William Faulkner

    Remember that time you had to write an essay on As I Lay Dying in high school and half of it made no sense? Turns out Faulkner felt the same way. When someone asked him about a sentence, he burst out laughing. “I have absolutely no idea of what I meant,” he said. “You see, I usually write at night [and]… always keep my whiskey within reach.” Still, the booze fueled some great (albeit tough) writing in works like Absalom! Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury. Plus the guy loved Mint Juleps. What’s not to like?

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