There was a time when writers drank, even in the office of The New Yorker, as Adam Gopnick shares in a recent piece. It is no secret that American literary history is colored by the number of its greats who gave themselves to drink; there was a time when art and alcoholism seemed inextricably linked.
A writer… stares out mournfully over the abyss of language—there are, truly, an infinite number of ways of forming the sentence you are about to attempt, all save one of them ugly and inadequate.
Writers continue to fight against the traps of falling into ugly and inadequate forms of expression, but Gopnick believes that more and more are staring into the abyss of language unaided by the liquid aids that fueled writing of the past.
