title: The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer
author:  Tom Dardis 
description: To those who harbor the notion that heavy drinking fosters creativity, this forceful, sobering study will serve as an antidote. Dardis profiles four alcoholic American writers: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and O'Neill. He argues that the first three burned themselves out before they had fully tapped their creative potential, a decline which the author, a professor at New York's John Jay College, links decisively to booze. Faulkner's whiskey binges and repeated hospitalizations, Fitzgerald's daily alcoholic despair and Hemingway's denial syndrome add up to a sad picture of self-destruction. Eugene O'Neill, on the other hand, quit drinking at age 38, and went on to write plays about the power of addiction, from The Iceman Cometh to Long Day's Journey into Night. Dardis ( Some Time in the Sun ) has produced a sensitive, invaluable group portrait that probes his subjects' addictions in ways neglected even by their biographers. Photos. <BR>Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: **The Destroyer**  
  
   **Missing Link**
  
   **by**  
  
   **Warren Murphy**  
  
   **& Richard Sapir**
  
  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are
  either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
  resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely
  coincidental.
  
    
  
  PINNACLE BOOKS
  
  are published by
  
  Windsor Publishing Corp.
  
    
  
  475 Park Avenue South
  
  New York, NY 10016
  
    
  
  Copyright (c) by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy
  
  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
  any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief
  quotes used in reviews.
  
   **CHAPTER ONE**
  
  Bobby Jack Billings had gone to bed deciding that the next day he would change
  his drinking habits. Not that drinking was a problem. Beer drinkers never had
  real drinking problems. He had read that in the Hills Gazette or someplace.
  Beer drinkers never got falling-​down drunk, running their 