The Trip to Echo Spring
On Writers and Drinking
New York : Picador USA, 2014.
Format: Book
Edition: First Picador paperback edition.
Description: xxiv, 353 pages : illustrations, map ; 21 cm
Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these writers were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" to "A Moveable Feast." Often, they did their drinking together: Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafés of Paris in the 1920s; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973. Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever's New York to Williams's New Orleans, and from Hemingway's Key West to Carver's Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery.
Contents:
Echo Spring -- The coffin trick -- Fishing in the dark -- A house on fire -- The bloody papers -- Going South -- The confessions of Mr. Bones -- Half of him -- Authors' dates -- The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Subjects:
Laing, Olivia -- Travel -- United States.
Authors, American -- 20th century -- Alcohol use.
Creative ability -- Psychological aspects.
Alcoholics -- United States.
Alcoholics in literature.
Alcoholism in literature.
Authorship -- Psychological aspects.
American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
Laing, Olivia -- Travel -- United States.
Authors, American -- 20th century -- Alcohol use.
Creative ability -- Psychological aspects.
Alcoholics -- United States.
Alcoholics in literature.
Alcoholism in literature.
Authorship -- Psychological aspects.
American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
ISBN:
9781250063731
Availability | |||
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Call Number | Location | Shelf Location | Status |
LITERATURE Reading Lai | Main (Downtown) | Third Level, Nonfiction | In |
Includes interview with Olivia Laing.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 321-331).
Includes bibliographical references (pages 321-331).