Ah, for the sweet, horrible half-mornings when you could count on opening Live Journal and find a thousand posts from those who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall . . . "

As a graduate student in 1988, I wrote a paper about the poet John Berryman, an American of the mid-twentieth century who had a tough life both as a child and as an adult. He was one of those people about whom I think, "Yes, they drank too much, but they had pretty good reasons." Now, in the year following the centenary of his birth, Farrar, Straus ( Read more... )

There have been several books in recent years about writers and drinking, so each new one needs a different twist. An effort last year by Olivia Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, features the British author traveling across the United States from New York to Washington State, with a few stops between. It's a very personal ( Read more... )