I hate Edgar Allan Poe.
Don't get me wrong, I love his short stories. I tolerate his poems, preferring The Cannibal Flea (I cannot find the author) to Poe's version.
It's just that Poe, among other writers, gives the rest of us writers a reputation it's impossible for us to live down to.
Edgar Allan Poe: an unstable alcoholic who married his 13-year-old cousin and was found dying in a gutter. History attributes his death as resulting from everything from alcoholism to syphilis to rabies.
Virginia Woolf: diagnosed with bipolar disorder, showed antisemitism in several of her written communications despite being married to a Jew, fought against the medical establishment's treatment of her disorder, committed suicide.
Tennessee Williams: prone to severe vegetative depressions, struggled with drug use, including the amphetamines and Seconal his doctor prescribed, mourned his younger days and loss of sexual attractiveness, died of choking on the cap of some nasal spray.
Dorothy Parker: escaped an abusive childhood, plagued with alcohol problems and self-doubt, put on the Hollywood blacklist for being a suspected Communist.
Even Stephen King had a substance abuse problem -- just about every substance, from what I can tell -- until he quit in the early 1980's.
One of my thoughts here, as I read over these synopses, is that all of us, if dissected so thoroughly, would have many of the same issues. Alcohol abuse isn't the sole province of classic writers, nor is mental illness. My biography would have some of the same elements if I were one of the great classic writers (without the alcohol and drug use, as I like to live life unhindered), but I'm not even published yet, much less classic.
I also wonder if the public documents writers' demons simply because we expect writers to have demons in order to be able to create. We still suffer from the belief that bipolar and depression create more creativity (the jury's still out on that; I'm only able to create when the edge is taken off my mood swings).
So, this is our takeway: Everyone has demons, and the demons aren't what qualify us to write.
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