Drinking in America

Since the beginning, drinking and taverns have been as much a part of American life as churches and preachers, or elections and politics. The interesting truth, untaught in most schools and unacknowledged in most written history, is that a glass of beer, a bottle of rum, a keg of hard cider, a flask of whiskey, or even a dry martini was often the silent, powerful third party to many decisions that shaped the American story from the seventeenth century to the present.

– From DRINKING IN AMERICA

In Drinking in America (Twelve – October 2015), bestselling author Susan Cheever chronicles our national love affair with liquor, giving alcohol its due as a stimulus and lubricant to some of the most pivotal moments in American history. This is the often-overlooked story of how alcohol has shaped events and the American character from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

Drinking has always been a cherished American custom: a way to celebrate and a way to grieve and a way to take the edge off. At many pivotal points in our history—the Pilgrims’ illegal Mayflower landing at Cape Cod, the McCarthy witch hunts, and the Kennedy assassination, to name only a few—alcohol has acted as a catalyst. In Drinking in America, Cheever brings us the fascinating backstories to these famous – and infamous – moments.

The American character has always oscillated between temperance and drunkenness, between the inebriated and the teetotalers. Covering everything from Paul Revere stopping off to drink on his famous ride to “our drunken friend” Richard Nixon, Cheever takes a long, thoughtful look at the way alcohol has transformed our nation’s history, both for the good and for the bad.

Some nations drink more than we do, some drink less, but no other nation has been the drunkest in the world as America was in the 1830s only to outlaw drinking entirely a hundred years later. Both a lively history and an unflinching cultural investigation, Drinking in America unveils the volatile ambivalence within one nation’s tumultuous affair with alcohol.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Cheever is the bestselling author of the biographies E.E. Cummings, American Bloomsbury, and My Name Is Bill, as well as five novels and four memoirs. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, and Newsday, among other magazines and anthologies. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been nominated for a National Book Circle Award, and won the Boston Globe Winship medal. She attended Brown University and has taught at many places, including Yale, Brown, Columbia, the New School, and Bennington College.