As Faulkner Lay Drinking
A look at the award-winning author’s complex relationship with liquor and writing.Philip Greene
09.20.16 1:02 AM ET
A close look at most great 20th-century novelists and playwrights will reveal lives, for better or for worse, well lubricated with alcohol. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Eugene O’Neill, Hunter S. Thompson, Tennessee Williams, Ian Fleming, Dorothy Parker, John Cheever, Charles Bukowski, Sherwood Anderson, Walker Percy, James Baldwin, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, Jim Harrison… The list goes on and on. Prominent on that roll call is, of course, William Faulkner, who would have turned 119 this weekend.
For these legendary writers, it became de rigueur to drink, often to excess. Fitzgerald noted that for the American writer, “the hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta.” Yet this affliction—er, condition—among writers goes back to ancient times. It was the great poet Horace (65-8 B.C.) who observed that, “No poems can please nor live long which are written by water-drinkers.”
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