| Edition |
First U.S. edition. |
| Description |
340 pages : illustrations, map ; 22 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 303-331). |
| Summary |
Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast. Often, they did their drinking together: Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafes of Paris in the 1920s; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973. Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever's New York to Williams's New Orleans, and from Hemingway's Key West to Carver's Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery. Beautiful, captivating, and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert. |
| Subject |
Authors, American -- 20th century -- Alcohol use.
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Creative ability -- Psychological aspects.
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Alcoholics -- United States.
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Alcoholics in literature.
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Alcoholism in literature.
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Authorship -- Psychological aspects.
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American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
|
| ISBN |
9781250039569 hardback |
|
1250039568 hardback |
|
