John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs

Synopsis

First published in 1913, John Barleycorn is the first intelligent literary treatise on alcohol in American literature. London offers acute generalizations on Barleycorn together with a close narrative of his own drinking career, which was heroic in scale. It is, however, as an exercise in autobiography that his book principally attracts the modern reader. London's life was tragically short but packed with episode and adventure.