White Logic

There are no second acts in American lives. F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous pronouncement, an epitaph for his own foreshortened career, points to a pattern of imaginative blight common among writers of the Lost Generation. As John W. Crowley shows in this study, excessive drinking was a crucial influence on the frequently diminished fortunes of these writers. Indeed, the modernists - especially the men - were a decidedly drunken lot.