Writing and Drinking (Or, More Than Likely, Not)

In my new book Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors, one of the subjects I looked at was writing and drinking. What I found was that heavy drinking, at least from this sample of authors, did not figure into the majority of their lives or writing processes…

Writers who drink/drank in moderation:
Margaret Atwood
Joan Didion
Richard Price
Salman Rushdie
Philip Roth
Zadie Smith
George Orwell
Junot Diaz

Writers who drink/drank to excess:
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Jack Kerouac
James Joyce

Writers who had little to no interest in a cocktail:
Franz Kafka
Toni Morrison
Vladimir Nabokov
Edith Wharton
Virginia Woolf

Hard to classify: David Foster Wallace, who wrote Infinite Jest and his other best work after successfully going into treatment for alcohol addiction.