Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers Read Online Free Page B

guiltless.” We’re not sure the Mai Tai will have that same effect on you, but it sure beats going to confession. Believed to have been invented by Victor Bergeron (Trader Vic) at his bar Hinky Dink’s outside San Francisco, the Mai Tai is, at the very least, a great umbrella drink.
    1 oz. light rum
    1 oz. dark rum
    ½ oz. Grand Marnier
    1 oz. lime juice
    ½ oz. orgeat (almond-flavored syrup)
    ½ oz. simple syrup
    1 mint sprig
    Fresh fruit (orange slice, pineapple chunk, etc.)
    Pour all ingredients (except mint and fruit) into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake, and then strain into a chilled double Old-Fashioned glass filled with cracked ice. Garnish with mint sprig and fruit.
From “The River,” 1930
    The last bear, shot drinking in the Dakotas
Loped under wires that span the mountain stream.
Keen instruments, strung to a vast precision
Bind town to town and dream to ticking dream.
But some men take their liquor slow—and count
—Though they’ll confess no rosary nor clue.

William Faulkner

    “Civilization begins with distillation.”
    Unlike most writers, Faulkner, from the very beginning of his career, drank while he wrote. He claimed, “I usually write at night. I always keep my whiskey within reach.” That he did. In Hollywood, hired by director Howard Hawks to write
Road to Glory,
Faulkner showed up to a script meeting carrying a brown paper bag. He pulled out a bottle of whiskey, but accidentally sliced his finger unscrewing the cap. If the film’s producer thought the meeting was over, he was wrong. Faulkner dragged over the wastepaper basket—so he could gulp whiskey and drip blood as they hashed out the story.
    ..........
    1897–1962. Novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter. Faulkner’s southern epic, the Yoknapatawpha cycle, includes his most celebrated novels,
The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, The Light in August, The Unvanquished,
and
Absalom, Absalom!
His most famous screenplays are
The Big Sleep
and
To Have and Have Not.
In 1949, Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
    MINT JULEP
    In the early 1800s, doctors used the word
julep
to describe “a kind of liquid medicine.” These were remedies in which leaves from the
mentha
family were used to soften the taste of the medication. Of course, this is not to suggest the Mint Julep is good for you, but it may be what Faulkner had in mind when he said, “Isn’t anythin’ Ah got whiskey won’t cure.” He was so much an authority on the drink that the famous Musso & Frank Grill in Los Angeles let him mix his own.
    7 sprigs of mint
    ½ oz. simple syrup
    3 oz. bourbon
    Crush 6 mint sprigs into the bottom of a chilled double Old-Fashioned glass. Pour in simple syrup and bourbon. Fill with crushed ice. Garnish with the remaining mint sprig and serve with two short straws. Sometimes a splash of club soda is added.
From
Sanctuary,
1931
    G OWAN FILLED THE GLASS LEVEL FULL and lifted it and emptied it steadily. He remembered setting the glass down carefully, then he became aware simultaneously of open air, of a chill gray freshness and an engine panting on a siding at the head of a dark string of cars, and that he was trying to tell someone that he had learned to drink like a gentleman. He was still trying to tell them, in a cramped dark place smelling of ammonia and creosote, vomiting into a receptacle.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

    “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”
    Fitzgerald’s preferred liquor was gin; he believed you could not detect it on the breath (a funny notion given his remarkably low tolerance). He would get roaring drunk on very little, but then it was the Roaring Twenties, and he was the symbol. Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were a pair of drunken pranksters. There are stories about how they jumped into the fountain at the Plaza Hotel, boiled party guests’ watches in tomato soup, stripped at the Follies. Invited to an impromptu party, “Come as you are,” he