How Sober Should a Writer Be?

Drinking in America has been on the decline. Myriad articles report this, some trendy, some clinical. [...] The first place I noticed this change was in confessional nonfiction. [...] Then I began to notice the same phenomenon in fiction, except in reverse. [...] Refreshingly, onto our sober bar cart lands On Booze, a slim showcase of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most spirited pieces, which will be reissued next month. [...] But there’s nothing quite like binging from the source. For all of Dorothy Parker’s quips about cocktails and Charles Bukowski’s bromides about beer, Fitzgerald’s prose alcohol content remains unparalleled—the irony being that he was a lightweight, forever trying to keep pace with Hemingway. As the critic John Lanchester wrote of him, “If ever there was someone who simply should not have drunk at all, it was Fitzgerald.” The prolific author’s life ended tragically, at forty-four, but damn if he couldn’t make a glamorous time seem regular. Sloane Crosley, The Yale Review