The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking

Laing, Olivia

ISBN 10: 1982664002 ISBN 13: 9781982664008

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing, 2019

Synopsis

OLIVIA LAING S WIDELY ACCLAIMED ACCOUNT OF WHY SOME OF THE BEST LITERATURE HAS BEEN CREATED BY WRITERS IN THE GRIP OF ALCOHOLISM

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 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.

About this title

About the Author

Olivia Laing's first book, To the River, was published to wide acclaim and short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. She has been the deputy books editor of the Observer, and writes for the Guardian, New Statesman, and Granta, among other publications. In 2018 she was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction.

Review

''[A] charming and gusto-driven look at the alcoholic insanity of six famous writers...There is much to learn from Laing's supple scholarship-and much to enjoy, too.'' --New York Times Book Review

''Most beguiling and incisive.'' -- New York Times

''Exquisite...Laing, wisely, doesn't reach any one-size-fits-all conclusions about the bond between the pen and the bottle...A marvelous writer.'' --NPR's Fresh Air

About this edition

• Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1982664002
• ISBN 13: 9781982664008
• Binding: Audio CD