Free Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers by Mark Bailey, Edward Hemingway

of a sudden there’s—peace!

Edmund Wilson

    “I’m afraid that if I had a little more money, I’d decide to spend all the rest of my life drinking beer.”
    Words and booze, essentials to the drinking writer, were celebrated by Wilson in his remarkable “Lexicon of Prohibition.”
Loaded to the muzzle, over the bay, fried to the hat, lathered, scrooched, spifflicated
—over a hundred contemporary terms for drunkenness. His was an age of “fierce protracted drinking,” parties where upon midnight the guests,
slopped to the ears,
broke phonograph records over each other’s heads. Wilson and his wife in fact had their own particular lexicon. In the Wilson household, currency was expressed in terms of bottles of scotch, as in “Come on, Edmund, let’s have the lawn mower repaired; it’s only ten bottles of Johnnie Walker.”
    ..........
    1895–1972. Critic and essayist. Wilson wrote for
Vanity Fair, The New Yorker,
and
The New Republic,
but is perhaps best known for the writers he helped to launch: Dos Passos, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Nabokov. His major works include
Axel’s Castle, The Wound and the Bow,
and
Patriotic Gore.
    WHITE RUSSIAN
    Wilson’s magnum opus,
To the Finland Station,
is a sweeping study of the Russian Revolution. Initially in praise of the Soviet Union and the revolutionary dream, Wilson soon reversed himself. We like to think it was the White Russian that did it.
    1½ oz. vodka
    1½ oz. coffee liqueur
    ¾ oz. heavy cream
    Pour first vodka and then liqueur into an Old-Fashioned glass filled with ice cubes. Stir gently. Pour the cream over the back of a bar spoon so as to float it on top.
    The White Russian can also be served straight up in a cocktail glass.
From
I Thought of Daisy,
1953
    W ITH AN IMPULSE OF IRRITATION , I broke in upon the imbecile with the drums, interrupting him in a loud clear voice and inquiring whether he knew the time. “I don’t know the time,” he replied, with his abstracted fatuous smile. “But,” he added, after a moment, when he had come to the end of a spasm of drumming, “I’ve got something else that’s just as good!” He produced a pint flask from his back pocket: “And a darn sight better!” he added. He offered me a drink, which I accepted. I sat down on a chair beside him. “This is something,” he further observed, after taking a swig himself, “that makes time unnecessary!” He had the conviction of quiet humor of a very stupid person. “If you carry a little flask,” he continued, after a brief pause—he had begun softly drumming again—“you don’t need to carry a watch!”

Thomas Wolfe

    “Other men taste—I swallow the whole.”
    Like many a hard-drinking man, Wolfe could be his own worst enemy. One time, eager to enter his latest short novel in a
Scribner’s Magazine
contest, he dashed off to see his editor, the famous Maxwell Perkins. The two men talked until the office closed and then at a bar in Grand Central Station. When Perkins’s train was announced, Wolfe walked him onboard, his legs now wobbling. Wolfe talked and talked until the train started moving, at which point he raced to the door and jumped. He fell, smack on the platform, stunned. The emergency cord was pulled, while Perkins and the other passengers stared down in horror. Wolfe apparently had bruised his arm and severed a vein. It would be impossible for him to finish the novel in time for the contest.
    ..........
    1900–1938. Novelist and short-story writer. Wolfe’s long and sprawling autobiographical novels were much admired by the next generation of writers, Jack Kerouac among them.
Look Homeward Angel,
his first book, brought early success. His last two novels,
The Web and the Rock
and
You Can’t Go Home Again
were published posthumously.
    ROB ROY
    A great cocktail for scotch drinkers like Wolfe, the Rob Roy is simply a Manhattan with scotch instead of rye. It has a bit more of a bite—but then so did Wolfe. He was known to actually bite