Authors do the cocktail party thing, but of course it's their personal life histories that determine how they'll handle it. To Goodwin, drinking is often an integral part of a writer's life. He points out that writers make their own hours, so it is easier for them to drink. It's expected that writers will drink, and writers live up to the expectation. Some writers think they get inspiration from alcohol.
Writers are loners and therefore drinkers.
Still, the evidence is anecdotal. Everyone agrees that more work and more biomedical investigation is needed to discover the causes of alcoholism among writers and assess the connection between writing and drinking. The impact of alcoholism on American letters is a subject that attracts increasing attention from literary scholars. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Little Drinking Problem takes a new look at Fitzgerald's drinking and tries to assess how it affected his writing. Between 1933 and 1937, Fitzgerald was hospitalized eight times for alcoholism and arrested at least as often.