SOURCE: "The Giant Killer: Drink and the American Writer," in Commentary, 61, 3, March, 1976, pp. 44-50.

In the following essay, Kazin surveys the often close association between alcohol and American writers in the twentieth century.

When drunk, I make them pay and pay and pay and pay.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

America has always been a hard-drinking country despite the many places and times in which alcohol has been forbidden by law. Even in Puritan days Americans were amazingly hard drinkers. It is history that liquor up to the Civil War was cheap as well as plentiful. In the first decades of the 19th century, spirits cost all of 25 cents a gallon domestic, and $1 imported. From 1818 to 1862 there were no taxes whatever on American whiskey, and it took the federal government's need of revenue during the Civil War to change things. The temperance movement, the Prohibitionist movement, the anti-Saloon League were...