Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die discussion

What did Americans do in the 1920ies to 1950ies? Apparently they drank – loads, and loads. I am reading The Sun Also Rises where three people have some drinks, then share three bottles of champaign, and THEN go out for dinner with wine.

I recently read The Great Gatsby and Raymond Chandler's three list books where continuous drinking also plays a major role and in enormous quantities. Maybe more natural since it is during or just after the prohibition. Marlowe even has a concept of “the office bottle”.

It is just a coincidence or was it a common trend in books from that period? I don't think it is particular America. Maigret in Georges Simenon's books also seems to drink all the time also while working.

I also recently read The Martian (not a list book). As a representative of today, the strongest drink he has is “Martian coffee”: Hot water with a caffeine tablet.

Maybe the 1920s writers included a lot of drinking scenes as a little " fu" to Prohibition and rightly believed that it wouldn't last much longer . So they wanted to portray how society really was versus what the government tried to force society to be .

You want to know how much they drank? Watch The Thin Man (1934) sometime and try to count just how much Nick and Nora drink in a single movie!

Without having seen it, I think The Sun Also Rises can compete: A person buys a 5 litre wine-skin and uses it to drink directly from.

Stuff like that seems to be common in the 1920-1950, why?

I would think it's a classic example of what happens when people are told they can't do something. For the Prohibition era, at least.

The Sun Also Rises was set in Spain. I dont think there was a Prohibition. I just think drinking was the norm and probrably still is in those circles. They are the artsy free spirits. As for Chandler, his characters are all damaged too.

They did drink a lot in some of those old novels. I read about the (English) character drinking Pernod in Jean Rhys' Good Morning, Midnight (1939) and then wanted to try it. I bought some and found I like it. This was set in France though. I also tried brandy "Stingers" after seeing a character drinking those in an old (American) movie, and drank those for a time :)

When I was growing up, drinking lunches were the norm for businessmen (and they were mostly men.) I remember my father rating the difficulty of clients by how many martinis he needed to deal with them. Also they drank and drove, and not only did we not wear seatbelts, we used to hold my baby sister on our laps while my parents drove us home after parties where they'd been drinking. This was not considered poor parenting - it was the norm in the late 60s.

Drinking has not retained the aura it once had.

When I read the three Chandler books, I was amazed Marlowe could stand up, let alone figure out what was going on. Weirdly, I'm not as bothered by the drinking in these older books. I was given three very popular current "mysteries" (I use the term loosely) for xmas, and the protagonists drink like fish. It bothered me to the point of distraction. Maybe it's just the quality of writing that makes the drinking easier to take.