Susan Cheever chronicles drinking in America

"And it was thought that Prohibition would be great for women because drinking was a male problem. Men were drinking and they didn't bring the money home to the women and children," she says.

"The income tax was instituted at the same time. Before then, thanks to Alexander Hamilton, almost the entire federal budget was based on liquor taxes, so they couldn't have had Prohibition. It couldn't happen until they had an income tax."

Writing & drinking

Booze and the muse:

"For me the biggest revelation of the book was the link between writing and drinking. It's so limited chronologically. It's not true until about 1925. In the 19th century, writers didn't drink. Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Long-fellow. Nope. No drinkers. It's not about the writers. It's about the drinking culture," Cheever says.

"Of course, some writers drink a lot, so much so that the five people who won the Nobel Prize for literature were all alcoholics, but only for two generations. I hadn't really done the math, and then it occurred to me that, of course, it came out of Prohibition, that Prohibition made drinking that much more attractive to writers," she says.

A year-by-year analysis shows that although many famous American writers drank too much, they did that only in the years after Prohibition and World War II.