The archetypal alcoholic writers were Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and O’Neill. As Tom Dardis showed in his fine study The Thirsty Muse (1989), only O’Neill managed to give up drinking, after which he wrote the masterpieces The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night. The others had sacrificed the creative drive by early middle age. They swallowed the myth that to be a good writer, you had to be a drinking writer. With addicted artists – whether they took alcohol, opium, or thorn apple – the prosaic truth is that they created art despite their dependency, and not because of it.