When I used to watch C-Span, I remember Ambrose say that he once had a drinking problem.
Hemingway. Edgar Allen Poe. Stephen Crane. Theodore Roethke. Herman Melville. Delmore Schwartz. Scott Fitzgerald. William Faulkner.... Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, John Cheever, Robert Lowell and Flannery O'Connor...........
'Ronald R. Fieve, in his 1975 book Moodswings, concedes that creative individuals tend to be eccentric and erratic, but he does not agree with the general Freudian idea that creativity is simply a response to emotional pain. That thesis "would say that art is rooted in sickness," he writes. "I would conclude that individuals are creative despite their disorders, but certainly not because of them."'