Why most of the famous writers warrant to alcoholism or liquor? A British based writer Olivia Laing is quite wondered about that as she had already visited United States to investigate the lives of already published and famous drunks such as John Cheever, John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. No doubt, these men have contributed a lot for modern American literature and supposed to be worldly known writers. Olivia writes that “All of these writers were considering the liquor as directly linked to the creative writing and it was in their mind that they been damaged by their childhood”.
Olivia Laing is writing a book titled as The Trip to Echo Spring: on Writers and Drinking and it is primarily focusing on the writers who were involved in drinking habits.
Furthermore a Journalist questions Olivia that during the beginning of 20th century, alcoholism was epidemic among the writers and poets of United States and your focus is on physiology of alcoholism but my question is that, were the American writers constantly using alcohol to fuel their creativity?
Olivia replied to that journalist as “It was not in the beginning of 20th Century rather it was linked to the entire 19th century till 1980s that writers used alcohol to lessen down their anxiety that was blocking the creativity”. Besides, the excessive use of alcohol clearly shows in the Hemingway’s book, Across the River and into the Trees that he lost his language and style of writing due effects of alcohol on his mind. Similarly, the plays of Tennessee Williams were not stages due to lack of coherence and it was just because of the overuse of drinking the liquor.