I don’t remember ever knowing of William Styron, but now I want to read him.

Styron, like many of his generation, was a drunk. It’s hard to imagine what American literature would be like today if booze had disappeared on Armistice Day 1918, not to reappear until, say, the fall of the Berlin Wall. It fuelled countless novels, not to mention movies, that we now consider classics. No doubt it also drowned equally many great works.

It appears as if alcohol was then the preferred self-medication for depressives, and when Styron quit drinking he sank into depression. Yet he emerged with a book on his experience that many consider a great one.