The list of writers who have used (and often abused) alcohol reads like a Who’s Who in Great Literature: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Chandler, John Cheever, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Pete Hamill, and Christopher Hitchens to name just a handful.

Ernest Hemingway famously advised, “Write drunk; editor sober.” Then again he also said, “The first draft of anything is shit.”

Yet while there’s a romantic notion that drinking fosters creativity, alcohol can’t create talent where there is none.





“There’s a certain kind of writer who is capable of making great work when drunk, but it takes a genius like a Faulkner or a Hemingway to do that,” says Rosie Schaap, author of the recently published Drinking with Men: A Memoir. “I’m kind of cagey about attaching any romance to drinking and writing as activities that go together.”

In other words, Schaap writes while sober. “I remember some great stories and interesting things that happened while I was drinking, but I’m not able to write about them when I’m drinking,” says Schaap, who writes the Drink column for The New York Times Magazine. “For me, writing and drinking don’t go together at all.”

Although Schaap’s book takes place almost entirely at bars, its main focus is not alcohol, but rather, the bar as community–a welcoming place where, like Cheers, everybody knows your name.

“As much as I love drinking,” says Schaap, “it’s really the bar that I love most of all.” By her own estimates, Schaap has clocked 13,000 hours at bars over the years, both as a bar regular and a bartender.