Word: alcoholic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer...
Many of the great authors drank--were alcoholics in fact--but drinking did not make them great. Or so Tom Dardis argues in The Thirsty Muse, a fairly engrossing study of alcohol and authorship. He maintains that drink made them shooting stars, living fast and peaking young. Alcohol inhibited their performance and dulled their perceptions...
Dardis' facts are usually more complete, but the conclusions he draws from them are often just as forced. His arguments for the artistic merits of O'Neill's sobriety rely on circular logic. If O'Neill wrote badly sober, Dardis would maintain that alcohol was still in his system and clouded his thinking. If he wrote well drunk, it was a fluke...
Dardis never satisfactorily explains how the authors wrote so well during their drinking phases, never addresses the fact that nearly all their great works had alcohol as a theme--such as O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises...
...never mentions them--never mentions that like other writers, they might have grown tired or lost their passion for writing, that they might have lost the vitality of youth or that their material had grown stale. So Dardis never really convinces that the authors were victims of alcohol alone...