Aside from being a great statesman and a writer and a painter, Winston Churchill, whom I mentioned in my last post, was a boozer. So were dozens of famous writers and artists. Among them are Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning (right), Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Francis Bacon.
How did they manage to produce under the influence? Did alcohol grease the wheels of their creativity?
An intriguing article in the current issue of Prospect Magazine (published in Britain) sheds some light on the questions --first quoting Churchill saying that drinking was critical to his writing of "The World Crisis," his six-volume memoir: "Always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me."
The article describes what it calls the "Churchill gene," MORE >>