I'd Be One Of These If Only I Could Write

Like many writers of my generation, I studied in the school of liquor and lit. Previous generations of American writers pointed the way. My literary heroes when I was learning the craft in the 1960s were (or had been) hard drinkers if not outright drunks: O'Neill and Saroyan and Williams, Faulkner and Steinbeck and Hemingway, Mailer and Baldwin and Cheever, James Agee. The hard-drinking American writer was a figure of mythic proportions, and by the time I graduated from UCLA I was eager to join his ranks.

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Via Coudal