The Patrick Hamilton Appreciation Society discussion

A list of ninety-nine writers who liked a drink…



F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Dorothy Parker
Jean Rhys
Jean Stafford
Aeschylus
Charles Bukowski
Norman Mailer
Stephen King
Lord Byron
Anne Sexton
Percy Shelley
Graham Greene
Samuel Coleridge
William Faulkner
J.D. Salinger
Edgar Allen Poe
Samuel Johnson
Raymond Carver
David Foster Wallace
Mary Karr
Zelda Fitzgerald
Malcolm Lowry
Dylan Thomas
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Robert Benchley
John Cheever
Tennessee Williams
William Butler Yeats
Li Po
Shirley Jackson
Edward Albee
O. Henry
James Joyce
Frederick Exley
Harry Crews
Oscar Wilde
Grace Metalious
Julie Powell
Alan Watts
James Frey
Lester Bangs
Patrick Hamilton
Tom Lux
Martin Amis
L. Ron Hubbard
Christopher Hitchens
Hunter S. Thompson
James Thurber
Raymond Chandler
Patricia Highsmith
Kingsley Amis
Philip Larkin
Truman Capote
Carson McCullers
Philip K. Dick
Oliver Goldsmith
Christopher Marlowe
Jacqueline Susann
Flann O’Brian
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Maeve Brennan
William S. Burroughs
Robert Lowell
Adela Rogers St. John
William Golding
Jack London
Stephen Crane
Evelyn Waugh
Hart Crane
Sylvia Plath
Delmore Schwartz
Herman Melville
Djuana Barnes
Theodore Roethke
Thomas De Quincy
Pete Hamill
David Carr
Caroline Knapp
Augusten Burroughs
Allen Tate
Richard Yates
Sinclair Lewis
Sherwood Anderson
Eugene O’Neill
John O’Hara
Ring Launder
Benjamin Franklin
Charles Cros
Koren Zailackas
Caroline Gordon
Conrad Aiken
John Berryman
Edmund Wilson
Joaquin Miller
Rabelais
Rimbaud
Verlaine
Baudelaire

This list is from this blog...
http://thoughtcatalog.com/oliver-mill...

Good to see our man in there.

To what extent might drinking and creativity go hand-in-hand?

Stephen King is now teetotal.
Has it affected his writing?

^ Good question Val.



Here's a shocking admission. I have never read anything by Stephen King. Should I put that right?

Strong Words 27 (May 2021)

One of the best books this month is In Love With Hell, William Palmer’s essays on alcoholic authors. Strong Words has always thought that many of drink’s problems could be solved by inventing a pill that mimics the sense of wellbeing experienced around the two-drink mark. That’s where inhibitions have been loosened for conversation to flow at its liveliest, but long before anyone needs to pick a fight, run over the roof of a parked car or sob in a dark room.
In Love With Hell contains a related idea, as once suggested by Myles na Gopaleen (better known as Flann O’Brien) in the forties or fifties, “A novel and alarming alcoholic drink is invented that results in instant nausea and intense headaches when consumed in the evening,” he reports, “but on awaking in the morning a feeling of great euphoria and health...pervades the drinker’s body”.
The inspired name of this new product is the “hang-under.”

The supremely-informative Strong Words review of Palmer’s book references among its eleven drouthy rascals:

- Anthony Burgess
- Malcolm Lowry
- Charles Jackson
- Richard Yates
- Elizabeth Bishop
- John Cheever
- Myles na Gopaleen
- Dylan Thomas
- Kingsley Amis

totalling (but not tee-totalling) nine. One wonders who the two missing wing backs might be?

Great stuff David


Loved it

I will ponder the wing backs

Some of these are lightweights compared to Brendan Behan - reputed to have said “I only drink on two occasions: when I’m thirsty and when I’m not.”

🤠🍻