The first extended literary analysis to take account of recent work by social historians on the temperance movement, this book examines the relationship between intoxication and addiction in American life and letters during the first half of the twentieth century. In explaining the transition from Victorian to modern paradigms of heavy drinking, Crowley focuses on representative fictions by W. D. Howells (The Landlord at Lion's Head), Jack London (John Barleycorn), Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night), John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra), Djuna Barnes (Nightwood), and Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend).

Crowley considers the historical formation of "alcoholism" and earlier concepts of habitual drunkenness and their bearing on the social construction of gender roles. He also defines the "drunk narrative," a mode of fiction that expresses the conjunction of modernism and alcoholism in a pervasive ideology of despair--the White Logic of John Barleycorn, London's nihilistic lord of the spirits.

John W. Crowley is professor of English at Syracuse University. He is editor of New Essays on Winesburg, Ohio and of Roger Austen's Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard, a Lambda Literary Awards Finalist. Crowley is author of The Black Heart's Truth: The Early Career of W. D. Howells and The Mask of Fiction: Essays on W. D. Howells.

"An engrossing account of several major American novels and their alcoholic writers. Crowley's account of Tender Is the Night and Appointment in Samarra are, by far, the best to date."—Tom Dardis, author of The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer

"An excellent study of modernist American fiction from the perspective of American drinking practices and addiction theory. Crowley mixes biography, literary reading, and social and cultural history into a very smooth cocktail, and the result is illuminating and invigorating."—Marty Roth, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis