Hey hippie, it’s 420.
The Daily Beast lists the best stoner novels and tries to make the point that writers aren’t all about speed and booze.
Being high is just not all that remarkable—less suited to literature, our culture suggests, and more suited to movies (some of which, like The Big Lebowski, undoubtedly the most penetrating treatment of the subject, are serious and subtle works of art), television, horrible jam bands (yep, they still exist), rap videos, and various effusions on YouTube. And yet, if you look closely, it’s there, it’s leached into literature. And if its place is less certain than, say, alcohol in the work of Richard Yates and F. Scott Fitzgerald, or heroin in the writings of William S. Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, James Carroll, and Irvine Welsh, it has achieved a certain, uh, eminence vert (sorry). Forthwith a few examples, in no particular order of eminence.