Literary Alcoholics: Debunking the Myth
Literary Alcoholics: Debunking the Myth

Summary/Abstract: It would not be an overstatement to claim that criticism concerning the question of alcoholic writers is heavily bent towards the American literary scene. In fact, American men and women of letters loom large in critical studies focused on the intersection between alcohol and literature, including those which are only partly discussed in literature per se. This would not be problematic as such were it not for the fact that they tend to mythologize alcoholic writers, even if partly unwittingly, often providing an image of a heavy-drinking figure with a typewriter and a bottle of rye whisky as two prerequisites for a successful completion of the creative process. However, as argued in the present article, such an approach may seem appealing to biographers, but is largely irrelevant in terms of considering literary contexts. Much as some writers can draw heavily on their own alcoholic experience, utilizing it in their own works, alcohol(ism) is not a factor which determines literary merit. Neither is it, as some would have it, a reliable stimulant, a writer’s muse, as it were. The present article attempts to debunk the myth of alcoholic writers, considering it predominantly a critical stunt which hardly adds anything momentous to the appreciation of literature.

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