The most relevant point in all three books is that great modern writers in the English language are very often alcoholics. He says on page 78 of Pharmako / Poeia:
“Opium was the drug of choice for the romantics, but for the moderns, the poets and writers of the first half or two-thirds of the twentieth century, the overwhelming preferred poison was alcohol. Donald W. Goodwin, in Alcohol and the Writer, writes: ‘six Americans had won the Nobel Prize in literature and four were alcoholic. (A fifth drank heavily and the sixth was Pearl Buck, who probably didn’t deserve the prize.)’ Goodwin concludes that, as a vocation, writers are over-represented in the population of alcohol addicts. Sinclair Lewis, an alcoholic himself, once quipped: ‘Can you name five American writers since Poe who did not die of alcoholism?’ Certainly enough of a problem that, for a writer alcoholism should be considered an occupational hazard.”
The canonical work on the subject of drugs and artistic creativity may be the three volume set by Dale Pendell:
Pharmako/ Poeia Pharmako/Dynamis Pharmako/Gnosis.
The most relevant point in all three books is that great modern writers in the English language are very often alcoholics. He says on page 78 of Pharmako / Poeia: