Equivocal spirits

About This Book

"Of the eight American Nobel Prize winners in literature, three--Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill and William Faulkner--were alcoholic drinkers, and two--Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck--were hard drinkers. Almost all critical comment about these writers has treated their drinking habits a somehow separate from their work. Thomas Gilmore argues that the result is neither good biography nor good literary criticism. He shows how the drinking and the work can each shed light on the other. Although readers and critics acknowledge that many modern writers tend to be heavy drinkers, [title] is the first full-length study of drinking as it is depicted in literature, both by writers who have had drinking problems and those who have not. This interdisciplinary study of science and literature explores the ways scientific knowledge of alcoholism may enlighten the reader as well as the means by which literature may confirm, intensify, dramatize, extend, and occasionally even challenge empirical studies. Examining the work of Malcom Lowry, Evelyn Waugh, Eugene O'Neill, John Cheever, Saul BEllow, F. Scot Fitzgerald, John Berryman, Kingsley Amis, and George Orwell, Gilmore evaluates the major genres of modern literature--drama, poetry, the short story, the novel--for the distinctive portrayals of drinking or alcoholism. He argues that good literature resists stereotyping the alcoholic and portrays instead a figure divided into a welter of conflicting feelings. Gilmore shows that literature conveys the complex struggle in a fictional character or in a real person in a way that science--which must be diagnostic, analytical, and objective--cannot."--Cover [p. 4].