Bottoms up: the messy reality about famous alcoholic writers

After listing 10 celebrated American authors who battled alcoholism, the writer said: “They all drank. In his 2021 book “In Love With Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven Writers,” British novelist and poet William Palmer puts it clearly. What he did not mention was some of Carver’s observations about his alcoholism made after he had sobered up. He counted the final decade of his life, before dying at 50 of cancer, as his greatest accomplishment and gift. He lived to age 96 and recommended writers “smoke like a fish and drink like a chimney.”Jim Coyle , a former Toronto Star journalist, had his last drink in 1993.