Biography of Famous Alcoholic and Writer William Seabrook

About the famous American writer and alcoholic William Seabrook, about his struggle with the disease.

WILLIAM SEABROOK (1886-1945). American author.

William Seabrook was a successful writer of 1st person travel and adventure books until alcoholism slowed his active life. He lived for 2 years among the Arabs, and also with the natives of Haiti, and among cannibals in Africa, writing books about his experiences. He was educated in Switzerland, served in the French Army in W. W. I, and worked as a reporter for The New York Times before turning to free-lance writing.

Seabrook had himself committed to an insane asylum in the mid-'30s in the hope of curing himself of alcoholism. The book Asylum chronicled that experience. In it he says: "I had been begging, pleading, demanding toward the last, to be locked up . . . shut up . . . chained up . . . where I couldn't get my hands on a bottle. I had become a confirmed, habitual drunk, without any of the stock alibis or excuses." He spent 7 months in the asylum and, when released, thought himself cured.

In his autobiography, No Hiding Place, published 7 years later, he confessed that he had been unable to free himself of the compulsion to drink. He took his own life with an overdose of sleeping pills at the age of 59.

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