When I’m in Boston, I drink at the Baseball Tavern across from Fenway Park. Some of his own quotes from a feature called Booze & Writer from 1978 may give some extra insight in King’s drinking at the time:ĭrinking Habits: Somewhere in that great middle ground between medium and heavy. He went to book signings drunk and at some point during the Seventies his wife Tabitha King kicked him out of the house. King managed to keep his drunken agression towards his children under control but nevertheless kept drinking heavily. The result was his most famous book The Shining, about a drunken father that wants to kill his own kid. These thoughts scared him and he decided to write about it in the hope that these feelings would dissapear. When King got drunk he noticed he often got agressive feelings towards his own children and wanted to physically hurt them. A development that didn’t stop after his first big hit Carrie in 1974.

In that time King for example got arrested for stealing traffic cones after a drunken night in the town.Īs more and more of King’s early writings got rejected by potential publishers, he started to drink more.

As the young writer’s drinking really picked up in his student days at the University of Maine. Both the birds and the jesters were later useful subjects for his horror stories. As a kid growing up in Maine (USA) King already had nightmares about crows picking out the eyes of his mother and a phobia for clowns. To escape from these fears he initially had two ways: writing about them and drinking. Basically King has always been quite miserable and scared, suffering from numerous phobias all through his life. Stephen King’s drinking habbits are pretty well described in his biography Haunted Hearts by Lisa Rogak. But unlike Jack Nicholson ( ‘Here’s Johnny!’) in the filmed version of The Shining, the writer never tried to hurt anyone. King just got smashed and wrote an enormous amount of books and shorts stories. His most famous book The Shining, about an alcoholic aspiring writer who wants to kill his own son, is based on King’s own drunken rages at the time. The legendary writer, who was most known for his thrillers and horror stories, drank so much he claims he doesn’t remember writing most of his work from the Eighties. And Stephen King (1947) was no exception to that rule. From Mark Twain to Ernest Hemingway, they knew their way around the bottle. It seems like almost every brilliant writer in history was a huge drunkard too.

The legendary writer Stephen King at work.

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