A Drinking Companion

Book excerpt: In an effort to cut back on his drinking, F. Scott's Fitzgerald briefly limited himself to only one glass of beer--thirty times a day. Dashiell Hammett drank himself into a writer's block that lasted thirty years, and John Cheever conquered a decade-long addiction to create his greatest novel. Malcolm Lowry would drink anything from gin to formaldehyde, while housewife/poet Anne Sexton always traveled with a thermos full of martinis. In her book Drinking Companion: Alcohol and the Lives of Writers, Kelly Boler looks at the many different ways that liquor ran through the lives and works of fifteen great writers. Told from varying vantage points--fame and obscurity, glamour and despair, suicide and recovery, shame and bravado --these stories shed an important light on the role that alcohol played in the real lives of our most creative artists.