A View from the Bridge is set among the Italian-American longshoremen of Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, and is framed by the commentary of Alfieri, a neighbourhood lawyer who acts as a chorus and who knows from the start that the story will end in blood. Eddie Carbone, a hard-working dock labourer, lives with his wife Beatrice and her orphaned niece Catherine, whom they have raised.
Medical tag
Alcohol
Drunkenness, alcoholism, delirium tremens, drink as social medicine.
Works
Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 'Everyone dies for himself alone') opens in Berlin in 1940, as the postwoman Eva Kluge delivers to Otto and Anna Quangel the news that their only son has been killed in the invasion of France. The Quangels live in a tenement at 55 Jablonski Strasse with neighbours who represent the range of life under Nazism: the Persickes, a family of brutal Party loyalists; old Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish widow whose flat is looted and who is hounded until she jumps to her death; and retired judge Fromm, who quietly helps where he can.
Locke says in the Epistle to the Reader that the Essay began when five or six friends meeting in his rooms found themselves at a standstill over questions of morality and revealed religion, and he proposed that they first examine what objects human understanding is fitted to deal with. Nearly twenty years later the result was a long, patient survey of where ideas come from, how they combine, how words signify them and how far knowledge and probable belief can reach.
Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, subtitled 'The Autobiography of a Horse', is narrated by a handsome black horse with a white star and one white foot. He grows up in a pleasant meadow under a kind master, Farmer Grey, and his mother Duchess teaches him to be gentle and good and to work willingly.
Maudsley's Body and Mind argues that mental life cannot be separated from bodily organization, nervous function, heredity, and disease. Based on the Gulstonian Lectures, the book brings Victorian psychiatry, physiology, and evolutionary thought into one frame.
BUtterfield 8, named for a fashionable Manhattan telephone exchange, is set in New York in 1931, in the last years of Prohibition and the early Depression, among speakeasies, apartment hotels and the blurred borderland between respectable society and its demimonde. Its central figure is Gloria Wandrous, a beautiful, intelligent young woman who drinks heavily, sleeps with men who interest her and lives partly on their generosity, while refusing to see herself as a kept woman or a prostitute.
Cannery Row is a loosely plotted, affectionate portrait of the sardine-cannery district of Monterey, California, during the Depression, built from short narrative chapters alternating with self-contained vignettes or 'inter-chapters'. Its centre is Doc, a gentle, learned marine biologist who runs the Western Biological Laboratory, collects specimens from the tide pools, listens to Gregorian chant and Bach, reads poetry, and is trusted by everyone on the Row.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
Parker's Complete Poems gathers the light verse that made her one of the best-selling poets of the 1920s and 1930s. The core of the volume is her three collections, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were combined in Not So Deep as a Well (1936), together with uncollected and early verse published in magazines from the 1910s onward.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
Crime and Punishment follows Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student in St. Petersburg, as he murders the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta while testing an idea about extraordinary persons who may step over ordinary law.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
Heraclitus's book does not survive; what remains are roughly 130 short sayings preserved as quotations by later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius. Modern editions number them according to Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (DK), and the reference edition presents them in a fresh translation with commentary.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
Frederick wrote the treatise known in English as Instructions for His Generals in the winter of 1746–1747, after the first two Silesian Wars had won and held the rich Austrian province of Silesia. Its French title was Les Principes généraux de la guerre; a German version, Die General-Principia vom Kriege, was printed in 1748 in a small number of copies for Prussian generals, who were bound to keep it secret.
Kraepelin's Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry introduces readers to psychiatric diagnosis through bedside cases and disease course. Rather than beginning with abstract definitions, the lectures proceed from patients: mood disturbance, excitement, confusion, delusions, hallucinations, deterioration, alcoholism, epilepsy, paralysis, dementia praecox, manic-depressive insanity, and other clinical groupings.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Lord Jim begins with an omniscient narrator describing Jim, a young English parson's son who went to sea after reading light holiday literature and dreams of heroic deeds. Injured by a falling spar, he recovers in an Eastern port and takes a berth as chief mate of the Patna, a decrepit steamer carrying eight hundred Muslim pilgrims across the Arabian Sea.
This volume collects three of Aristophanes' comedies (contents vary by edition; a long-standing selection is The Acharnians, The Clouds and Lysistrata). The Acharnians (425 BCE), the earliest surviving comedy, is set in the sixth year of the Peloponnesian War.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
Mansfield Park follows Fanny Price, the timid daughter of a poor, overburdened family in Portsmouth, who at ten is taken in by her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park in Northamptonshire. Her other aunt, the officious and mean Mrs Norris, never lets her forget her dependent status, and her cousins Tom, Maria and Julia treat her with indifference.
On Liberty asks what limits there are on the power society may legitimately exercise over the individual. Mill opens by observing that the old struggle between subjects and rulers has been transformed by democracy.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal.
The Age of Alexander is a collection of nine of Plutarch's Lives covering the Greek world in the fourth and early third centuries BCE, from the decline of Sparta and Thebes through the rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander to the struggles of his successors. Removed from their original Roman pairings, they read as a sequence of Greek history told through character.
This volume contains Tacitus' two earliest works, both written in 98 CE, soon after the assassination of the emperor Domitian. The Agricola is a biography and eulogy of the author's father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who died in 93.
The Arthashastra, the 'science of material gain' or of statecraft, is a vast Sanskrit treatise on how a king should acquire, protect and govern territory. Written mostly in prose with occasional verses, it is divided into fifteen books and some 150 chapters, and covers almost every aspect of administration with remarkable detail and an unsentimental realism that has led to comparisons with Machiavelli.
The Bacchae and Other Plays presents Euripides at his most dangerous: gods are real, but that does not make them gentle. The Bacchae begins when Dionysus arrives at Thebes in disguise to punish the royal house for denying his divinity and slandering his mother Semele.
The Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book.
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
The Brothers Karamazov centers on the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a sensual, neglectful father whose sons embody conflicting responses to desire, faith, reason, and guilt. Dmitri is passionate, impulsive, indebted, and publicly at war with his father over inheritance and Grushenka.
The Fall of the Roman Republic is a selection of six of Plutarch's Roman Lives, arranged to tell the story of the Republic's collapse in the century before Augustus: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. Read in sequence, they show how military glory, personal ambition and civil war destroyed Rome's traditional government.
The Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
The Power and the Glory is set in an unnamed Mexican state during an anticlerical campaign that has outlawed or driven out Catholic priests. Its central figure is the last active priest in the region, a fugitive known as the whisky priest because of his alcoholism and moral failures.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
The Rule of St Benedict is a concise manual for forming a stable monastic community. It opens by calling the monastery a school for the Lord’s service and asks what kind of person desires life.
The Symposium is a framed dialogue about eros, memory and ascent. Apollodorus repeats what Aristodemus told him about a banquet at Agathon’s house after the poet’s tragic victory.
The Underdogs follows Demetrio Macias, a peasant from Juchipila who joins the Mexican Revolution after conflict with federal soldiers makes ordinary life impossible. At first Demetrio's rebellion is local and personal: he flees with a band of men into the hills, fights effectively and becomes a leader because of courage, terrain knowledge and charisma.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
Travels with My Aunt begins with retired bank manager Henry Pulling attending his mother's funeral. There he meets his formidable Aunt Augusta, who disrupts his suburban routine and suggests that his family history is less settled than he believed.
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr.
Passages
- A View from the Bridge, Act 2 (two-act version), opening
Eddie comes home drunk and kisses both Catherine and Rodolpho.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XXI
The will determined by present uneasiness; the drunkard who sees his health and estate decaying yet returns to drink.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XXVII
Personal identity through consciousness; cases of forgetting, drunkenness, sleepwalking and alternating consciousness, and their bearing on punishment.
- Black Beauty, Part II
Reuben Smith rides drunk, Beauty falls and breaks his knees, Smith is killed; Beauty is left scarred and devalued.
- BUtterfield 8, Throughout
Speakeasy drinking, hangovers and the role of alcohol in every social encounter.
- Cannery Row, First and second parties
Drink fuels both parties, destructively and joyfully.
- Ceremony, Bar scenes with Harley, Leroy and Emo
Veterans' drinking, boasting and the outbreak of violence; Tayo's attack on Emo.
- Civilization and Its Discontents, Ch. II
Survey of methods of avoiding suffering: intoxication as the crudest and most effective chemical method, with the danger that it wastes energy; killing the drives as in yoga; sublimation; fantasy; flight into neurosis or psychosis; love; beauty.
- Complete Poems, Various poems across the collections
Drinking, hangovers and night-time wakefulness as part of the speaker's romantic misery.
- Confessions, Book IX.8
Monica as a girl falls into a habit of sipping wine from the cellar until rebuked by a servant.
- Crime and Punishment, Confession and exile
Crime and Punishment gives this tag concrete force through this is a major psychiatric novel: fever, delirium, obsession, dissociation, alcoholism, suicide, trauma, and moral injury drive the action
- David Copperfield, Ch. 15–16, 25, 39
Mr Wickfield's increasing reliance on port wine and Heep's exploitation of it.
- Fragments, DK 117–118
The drunk man with a moist soul led by a boy; the dry soul as wisest.
- Humboldt's Gift, Middle sections
Humboldt's paranoid accusations, violence toward his wife, use of drink and pills, and commitment to Bellevue.
- Instructions for His Generals, Articles on subsistence and sutlers
Bread supply, field bakeries and the regulated sale of beer and brandy to troops.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. VIII
Madness as excessive passion; rage and melancholy; the man in Bedlam who claims to be God the Father; drunkenness; the Abdera fever epidemic and the hanging maidens of a Greek city.
- Lord Jim, Ch. 5
Marlow visits the Patna's chief engineer in hospital, raving in delirium tremens about pink toads under the bed; the hospital doctor comments on the case.
- Lysistrata and Other Plays, The Acharnians, finale
Lamachus returns wounded and calls for the doctor Pittalus while Dicaeopolis revels.
- Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3
The drunken Porter on the three things drink provokes.
- Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. 13–14 (Ch. 44–45)
News that Tom has fallen dangerously ill with fever after a drinking bout and a fall; his return home and nursing.
- On Liberty, Ch. IV, Of the Limits to the Authority of Society
The United Kingdom Alliance's case for prohibition and its doctrine of 'social rights' against the drink trade, which Mill rejects.
- On Liberty, Ch. V, Applications
Drunkenness as self-regarding unless tied to violence; taxation of stimulants; the opium import ban in China and the Maine Law listed as interferences with buyers.
- On the Road, Throughout
Marathon drives, all-night jazz clubs and continuous drinking, with sleep deprivation treated as a kind of ecstasy.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part Two, 'Samsara'
Siddhartha's gradual decline into gambling, wine and satiety, ending in self-disgust.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 50–52
In a drunken quarrel Alexander kills Cleitus, then lies prostrate with remorse for days.
- The Agricola and the Germania, Germania 22–23
German drinking habits, quarrels at feasts, and deliberation over drink; their beer-like beverage.
- The Arthashastra, Book 2 (superintendent of liquor)
Regulation of the production and sale of alcoholic drinks and the conduct of drinking houses.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, first messenger speech
The bacchants nurse animals, strike the ground for water and wine, and tear cattle apart.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §1
Dream as the physiological basis of Apollonian art, including the sense that the dream is mere appearance; intoxication by narcotic draught as the basis of Dionysian art; the St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers.
- The Brothers Karamazov, Rebellion and holiness
The Brothers Karamazov gives this tag concrete force through its medical material includes epilepsy, hysteria, alcoholism, trauma, patricidal obsession, suicidal despair, and the contagious psychology of families
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Marius 45
Marius, aged and drinking heavily, falls ill with pleurisy and in delirium imagines himself fighting Mithridates.
- The Histories, Book 6.75, 84
Cleomenes goes mad and mutilates himself with a knife; the Spartans blame his habit of drinking unmixed wine.
- The Koran, Sura 2:219; 5:90–91
Wine and gambling: first described as containing sin and some benefit, later forbidden as works of Satan.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, Big Blonde
Hazel Morse's party persona, drinking, depressive decline and suicide attempt make the story central for alcoholism and gendered despair.
- The Power and the Glory, Opening section with Mr. Tench
The dentist's decayed professional life and the priest's search for brandy establish bodily and spiritual malaise together.
- The Power and the Glory, Village and flight chapters
The priest's craving for alcohol recurs alongside fear, fatigue, hunger and the need to perform sacraments.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter IV: Habit
Plasticity of nervous tissue, practical maxims for breaking bad habits, and the drunkard who excuses each lapse though his nerve cells register it.
- The Rule of St Benedict, Chapters 39–41
Food, drink, wine and meal times are regulated with moderation and adaptation.
- The Symposium, Symposium setting
The guests regulate drinking after earlier excess, making intoxication part of the social frame.
- The Symposium, Alcibiades speech
A drunken Alcibiades describes erotic fixation, shame and failed seduction of Socrates.
- The Underdogs, Camp and march episodes
The fighters' drinking, hunger, fatigue and casual violence create a field medicine atmosphere without stable institutions.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures IX and X: Conversion
Sudden and gradual conversion explained through subconscious incubation, with cases of drunkards rescued by religious experience, including S. H. Hadley.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures XVI and XVII: Mysticism
The four marks of mystical states; alcohol as the exciter of the 'Yes function'; nitrous oxide and ether revelations; epileptic auras and the darker 'diabolical mysticism' of insanity.
- Travels with My Aunt, Travel episodes
Alcohol, risk and movement become comic antidotes to Henry's stagnant safety.
- Treasure Island, Admiral Benbow chapters
Billy Bones's heavy drinking, stroke-like collapse and death bring alcohol, vascular crisis and fear into the opening.
- Wuthering Heights, Hindley's decline
Hindley's alcoholism, gambling and violence after Frances's death damage Hareton and the household.
Quotes
“But is not a man drunk and sober the same person? why else is he punished for the fact he commits when drunk, though he be never afterwards conscious of it”
“A man, when he gets drunk, is led by a beardless lad, tripping, knowing not where he steps, having his soul moist.”
“For the effect of the wine, does but remove Dissimulation; and take from them the sight of the deformity of their Passions”
“it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance”
“Drunkenness, for example, in ordinary cases, is not a fit subject for legislative interference”
“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts”
“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities”
“It is either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the hymns of all primitive men and peoples tell us, or by the powerful approach of spring penetrating all nature with joy, that those Dionysian emotions awake, in the augmentation of which the subjective vanishes to complete self-forgetfulness”
“Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar”
“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature”
“Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes”