Drunken Writers

From the Essay and Blog Archives

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway both redefined American literature. Many aspiring writers sought to imitate their styles, especially Hemingway’s. Along with their defining stylistic influence, Fitzgerald and Hemingway shared a key trait with many 20th Century American writers.

Edgar A. Robinson, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Hart Crane, Eugene O’Neill, Ring Larder, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Robert Bencheley, James Thurber, John O’Hara, John Steinbeck, Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, e.e. cummings, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Truman Capote, William Saroyan, Conrad Aiken, Jack Kerouac, James Agee, James Jones, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarell, Anne Sexton, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver all shared the same trait with Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

The common trait was alcoholism. The above list of names is a virtual “Who’s Who” among 20th century American writers. Literary critic Scott Donaldson examined this phenomenon of alcoholic writers in his book Hemingway versus Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship. Donaldson relied on a book called Alcohol and the Writer by Donald Goodwin for his research. Only bartenders had higher rates of alcoholism than writers, according to Goodwin.

What caused these writers to succumb to an epidemic of alcoholism? Is it the case that a bottle of Jack Daniels might help an aspiring writer more than a course in creative writing? Goodwin says, “Writing is a form of exhibitionism; alcohol lowers inhibitions and prompts exhibitionism in many people.” Certainly 20th century writers dropped social inhibitions in their writings. Hemingway’s parents were quite shocked at his early works. Fitzgerald revealed many marital tensions from his life in his fiction. Social, sexual, and moral boundaries were all erased by modern authors. There is no bit of shocking content in today’s movies, television, and fiction that was not previously explored by these writers.

Goodwin says, “Writing requires an interest in people; alcohol increases sociability and makes people more interesting.” Part of the dual nature of writers is that they must inhabit the lone world of the mind, but they must know the world of people. Certainly, strong drink has a social dimension whether it is in the context of barroom drinking, parties, or conversation with a friend.

“Writing involves fantasy; alcohol promotes fantasy,” Goodwin says. In one sense we distinguish between literature that is fantasy literature, such as Tolkien’s works, and literature that is realistic, like Hemingway. Yet all writing, even the most realistic, involves imagination or fantasizing.

“Writing requires self confidence; alcohol bolsters confidence. Writing is a lonely work; alcohol assuages loneliness. Writing demands intense concentration; alcohol relaxes,” says Goodwin. All of the characteristics of writers that are aided by alcohol help explain this correlation between writing and alcoholism.

Other writers have added even more to the probable causes. Malcolm Cowley said that alcohol both depresses the nervous tension common to writers and stimulates the creative process. Southern novelist Walker Percy said alcohol helps the writer through ‘reentry’ after the exaltation of writing. “What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of The Sound and the Fury?” Percy asks. “Get drunk for a week.”

Perhaps even more perceptive is the comment of poet David Hall, “There seems to be an assumption, widely held and all but declared, that it is natural to want to destroy yourself.” This self-destruction forms a large portion of the autobiographies of many writers.



I recently had the occasion to reread Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. I had read both works in high school and had once reread Gatsby, but had generally stayed away from these works. During the spring, I taught these two authors in the context of American history and literature. As a picture of the despair and nihilistic courage of 20th century man after World War I, Hemingway’s portrayal of Frederick Henry’s doomed romance was brilliant. One of my students referred to it as a fairy tale turned bad. As a picture of the surface glitter and inner hollowness of the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald’s story of Jay Gatsby is likewise brilliant.

Paul Johnson refers to the time when these books appeared as “fertile in American literature generally.” He says, “The novels of the period included Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (1920), John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers (1921), Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay (1926), Upton Sinclair’s Boston (1928), and in 1929, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. That is, by any standard, a brilliant decade.”


The lives of Hemingway and Fitzgerald carry out all of the philosophical and literary themes of their work. Hemingway had three marriages that ended in divorce, and his own life was characterized by numerous adulteries, drunkenness, fights, and breakups with friends, and finally suicide. Fitzgerald embarrassed himself and his friends constantly by his drunken and outlandish behavior. After several years in New York and France in which the Fitzgerald’s lived to party, they returned to America. Zelda Fitzgerald spent quite a few years in sanatoriums, while Scott’s writing career crashed. His last work, The Last Tycoon, like his life itself, was unfinished when he died while yet in his early 40s. He really never grew up and never fulfilled the early promises.



I also recently reread and taught through William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished. Faulkner was a contemporary with Fitzgerald and Hemingway, but was in a different league. Fitzgerald and Hemingway found their literary compasses in post-war Paris, gathering with the intellectual and artistic elite who gathered in the literary salons and the apartment of Gertrude Stein. Faulkner had occasion to travel in Europe, but he found his bearings and literary world in Mississippi. Southern culture and history formed the basis for his creation of Yoknapatawpha County, which was home for his novels and stories.

Yet Faulkner’s life and marriage was a mess. He didn’t just get drunk for a week after finishing The Sound and the Fury. Whether homebrew or fine wines, Faulkner guzzled at the bottle as often as he neglected traditional grammar and syntax. Still he too was brilliant and many of his writings are among the best of the century. As Donaldson says in answering the question about the best American writers of the 20th century, “The three apparent winners in the American literary competition…are William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, in no particular order beyond this alphabetical one.”

In one sense, we all wish to overlook “a fault.” Sure, these guys and others were alcoholics, but they wrote such good stuff. The question is not just about literature. “Art for art’s sake” is a painfully deficient slogan. Art is to imitate something of life and is to be a mode of knowledge about life. Literature has been called history without footnotes. I think it is also philosophy without abstractions and theology without Bible references.

Literature, whether viewed as something we write or something we read, is a necessary component of life, but a poor god. Literary persons needed fellowship and they needed something sacramental. They needed the “reentry” Walker Percy referred to. In the case of these Twentieth Century writers, their stories were, almost without exception, tragic stories of despair. Hemingway’s heroes were cheated out of life. Frederick Henry’s lover Catherine died and Santiago’s great fish was eaten by sharks. Fitzgerald repeatedly told the story of the young man aspiring to wealth and the love of a beautiful woman, who usually is wealthy. Jay Gatsby lost any chance to acquire Daisy and lost his life as well. While Bayard Sartoris, in Faulkner’s Unvanquished, rises to a level of knightly greatness, his family—like so many in the Faulkner canon—is ruined in the sequel, titled Sartoris.

The mean, the dirty, the ugly always triumphs in realistic literature. These works resonate with us because they are a megaphone to the reality of sin in this world. A Jack London character says, “Life is a mess…. The big eat the little that they may continue to move; the strong eat the weak that they retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all.” Dreiser said, “We suffer for our temperaments, which we did not make, and for our weaknesses and lacks, which are no part of our willing and doing.” And Hemingway’s character Frederick Henry philosophizes about life, saying, “You did not know what it was all about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you.” Fitzgerald ends The Great Gatsby with the melancholy reflection, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Whether one’s field of vision is the evening report of world news or the darkened journey into the individual soul, the despair and depravity so prevalent in modern literature is attested to as being all too true. So whether the tale is told by alcoholic or depressed idiot or both, the sound and fury signified little good or hopeful. But these modern writers disconnected the megaphone after delivering the bad news and before completing the message. Redemption is just as real as sin.

One writer who stands noticeably apart from the prophets of despair and devastating effects of alcohol was Flannery O’Connor. She was realistic and modern in her writings. She focused on the grotesque in Southern life as a mirror for the grotesqueness of the sinful heart. She described her philosophy as follows: “I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and that what I see in the world I see in relation to that.”

William Butler Yeats recognized the modern crisis early on, saying, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Wars, genocide, the emptiness of materialism, the evils of totalitarianism, and modern philosophies, combined with “all of the miseries of this life, to death itself” were enough and more to drive any sane person to drink, even to excess. But the alcohol was as poor a savior as literature itself. Flannery O’Connor certainly knew of despair, pain, and misery both from her wide readings and from personal experience with illness. In short, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others succumbed to alcoholism because they rejected Christ. But O’Connor’s faith gave her a focal point beyond the final period in her writings and a focal point greater than the buzz from a bottle.

O’Connor’s triumph in life mirrors her triumph in art.