Who Has Been America's Drunkest Writer?

F. Scott Fitzgerald.

From a piece in the Daily Beast...

As Thomas Gilmore asserts in Equivocal Spirits: Alcoholism and Drinking in Twentieth-Century Literature and John Crowley corroborates in The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction, the fable of Fitzgerald’s Edgar-Allan-Poe-like low tolerance was likely just that—a fable, helped by an alcoholic’s tendency to sometimes conceal consumption and sometimes boast about over-consumption. But whatever the legend of his drinking capacity (Hemingway himself witnessed another time when Fitzgerald drank far more than he ever saw and was completely fine, even telling articulately the story of him and Zelda’s life) by the thirties Fitzgerald was not so much as capitalizing but clutching onto the persona of a washed-up alcoholic. He was obsessed with his great literary promise and the even greater subsequent disappointment, knowing that alcoholism was behind it but had not been the sole cause to a tragedy so immense (to him). At his lowest point, in 1935, he claimed to have “not tasted so much as a glass of beer for six months,” which was likely untrue.

This practice of constant myth-making and denial offered Fitzgerald perhaps the most painful decline of all the great novelists. He wasn’t so much a victim of alcoholism as the very embodiment of alcoholism—or the stages of alcoholic recovery, in reverse. He was so submerged in drink that he didn’t even need to write about booze for us to connect his thoughts to booze. His words and his life had all the makings of a stiff drink, in all its nighttime glamour and morning gravity.