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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure?

>Alcohol has played a central role in the creative lives of some of the most famous authors of the last few centuries. Lewis Hyde notes in his essay Alcohol and Poetry that four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature were alcoholics, namely William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/booze-as-muse-write...

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No, I'm not sure, but it could go either way. It could very well be that those authors had no other choice than drown their overflowing creativity in alcohol in order to survive / tolerate themselves.

From what I have read, they all wrote when they were sober, not when they were drunk.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrydevries/2018/12/11/ernest-...

In "Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson", it's made very clear that Hunter did _not_ write while he was sober. An excerpt of his daily schedule -

9:00(pm) starts snorting cocaine seriously

10:00 drops acid

11:00 Chartreuse, cocaine, grass

11:30 cocaine, etc, etc.

12:00 midnight, Hunter S. Thompson is ready to write

12:05-6:00 a.m. Chartreuse, cocaine, grass, Chivas, coffee, Heineken, clove cigarettes, grapefruit, Dunhills, orange juice, gin, continuous pornographic movies.

The OP was talking about "William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck"... "what about Hunter S. Thompson?" isn't really a good argument. He's not considered a great writer in the grand scheme of things, I think he's better known for being a drug addict.

The idea, since it appears to have been lost on you, is that there's a long history of great writers (like Thompson) using drugs while they created. The Thompson quote is one of many, I think that's the part you may be misunderstanding. Truthfully, I'm surprised that a single Forbes article which quotes a "Michelle Stansbury, PR expert and founder of Little Penguin PR" is enough to have convinced you otherwise.

Find an article that says that great works of the English language were produced while the authors were drunk then?

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