The author concentrates on four American writers - William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O'Neill - and investigates the part alcoholism played in their lives and the ways in which it affected their writing. Basing his study on recent research into alcoholism, he explores hereditary and environmental influences and the tragic consequences of seeking the altered state of consciousness that led, for too many of America's men of letters, not to inspiration, but to creative burn-out and self-destruction.