In the class were several older students, schoolteachers mostly. 'I drink,' he said after one binge, 'because it's the only time I can stand it.'' Was it ever thus? A friend of mine was teaching a survey course in American literature one summer session at the University of Houston. He appeared on a talk show, drunk and rambling. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital in New York, which he called the Devil's Island of alcohol clinics. He went to the Smithers Alcoholism Rehabilitation Unit of St. He could stay off the booze for three or four months, and then he went back on it. Dried out, he was soon drunk again he fell, cracking his teeth and bloodying his head. After he was arrested for drunken driving on Long Island, he went to Silver Hill, an expensive clinic in Connecticut for alcoholics.

While Capote was writing 'In Cold Blood,' he would have a double martini before lunch, another with lunch and a stinger afterward. In his biography of Truman Capote, published last spring, Gerald Clarke detailed the horrors of Capote's drinking. Even after a heart attack and a stroke she drank. Several times she passed out on the floor and stayed there all night. It worked for a while, but she went back to drinking until she suffered from delirium tremens and endured falls and injuries. She told her sister that she hated to drink, that it made her unspeakably miserable but that she could not stop. If she went out to dinner, friends had to help her home.

Her drinking progressed until 'she hardly drew a sober breath,' as a friend recalled. She started drinking in college, and in her twenties was sipping sherry in the morning while she wrote. David Roberts' just-published biography of novelist and journalist Jean Stafford reveals the harrowing details of her alcoholism. and the conquest of alcoholism,' said her obituary. 'Her personal triumphs were accompanied by tragedy. John, a very different kind of writer, a 'sob sister' and author of romances, died. After being hospitalized for the fourth time, he turned to Alcoholics Anonymous and quit drinking.' The same month, Adela Rogers St. 'But that was also the year he began to drink heavily. 'He began achieving recognition as a writer in 1967 when his story 'Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?' was selected for the anthology 'Best American Short Stories,' his obituary said. Raymond Carver, acclaimed author of stories about America's working poor, died last August at the age of 50. Do writers drink more than other people? It would seem so.

Jack london alcoholic