Changes

|title=The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink

|sort=Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink, The

|publisher=Canongate

|date=August 2013

|website=http://olivialaing.co.uk/

|video=xZ8HAH41zxo

|summary=A journey across the United States to visit the haunts of six famous American 20th century writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams, and examine the link between creativity and their drinking problems.

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Coming from a family with an alcoholic background, Olivia Laing became fascinated by the idea of why and how some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature were written by those with a drink problem. The list soon became a long one – Dylan Thomas, Raymond Chandler, Jack London, Jean Rhys, to name but a few, instantly came to mind. In the spring of 2011 she crossed the Atlantic to take a trip across the USA, from New York City and New Orleans to Chicago and Seattle by hired car and train, in the course of which she took a close look at the link between creativity and alcohol which inspired the work of six authors, namely F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. Taking her title from a character in Williams’s play ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ who says he is taking a trip to echo spring, an euphemism for the liquor cabinet, she travels to the places which were pivotal in their often overlapping lives and work.