Note 46 — Chapter VIII · Sherwood Anderson on This Side of Freud

The part played by drunkenness in recent American fiction is appalling. In the good old days drinking used to be poetic and it was still Horatian in the way the late Barrett Wendell presented it in a famous essay. Since prohibition, it has become a narcotic and a dope. The triumph of drunkenness as a deus ex machina in modern American literature will be found in Eugene O’Neill’s plays, although the fact that we pass our time on his stage mostly among sailors, may be taken as an extenuating circumstance.