In Books: ‘The Trip to Echo Springs: On Writers and Drinking’

Ernest Hemingway at the bar – again

Late last year, the British writer Olivia Laing publishedThe Trip to Echo Springs: On Writers and Drinking. It’s a rambling and discursive but smart portrait of a half-dozen writers and their struggles with the devil’s brew (Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald). Laing takes her title from a line inCat on a Hot Tin Roofand indulges in more than a few Williams-ian flights of writerly fancy alon...