The trip to Echo Spring : on writers and drinking

Resource Information

The work The trip to Echo Spring : on writers and drinking represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Wilmington Memorial Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The trip to Echo Spring : on writers and drinking

Title remainder

on writers and drinking

Statement of responsibility

Olivia Laing

Creator

• Laing, Olivia

Subject

• Alcoholics in literature
• Alcoholism in literature
• American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism
• Authors, American -- 20th century -- Alcohol use
• Alcoholics -- United States
• BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary
• Creative ability -- Psychological aspects
• HISTORY / Social History
• PSYCHOLOGY / Creative Ability
• Authorship -- Psychological aspects

Language

eng

Summary

"In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men 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 cafes 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. Beautiful, captivating, and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert. - For readers of Amanda Vaill's When Everyone Was So Young, Elif Batuman's The Possessed, and Kingsley Amis's Everyday Drinking"--

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

810.9/353

Illustrations

• illustrations
• maps

Index

no index present

LC call number

PS129

LC item number

.L25 2014

Literary form

non fiction