Word: neill
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...buffs remember the 1920s as the strange season of triumph for American literature. Ernest Hemingway. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gertrude Stein--all American expatriates--wrote tales that captivated not only American readers, but also audiences worldwide. In that decade, William Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury, and Eugene O'Neill won the Pulitzer Prize in drama three times...
Dardis' thesis is a fascinating one, but it is also one that he does not adequately support. The book convincingly details the drinking of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and O'Neill--there is little doubt in the readers' minds that all the authors are alcoholics...
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...
...reading The Thirsty Muse, the reader never doubts that the writers became powerless in the face of alcohol. Dardis writes that only O'Neill escaped its trap. But O'Neill merely traded addictions--he died a drug addict. Dardis does not even begin to explain what caused the author to fall prey to another addiction...