"First you take a drink," F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, "then the
drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you." Fitzgerald wrote alcohol
into almost every one of his stories. On Booze gathers debutantes and
dandies, rowdy jazz musicians, lost children and ragtime riff-raff into
a newly compiled collection taken from The Crack-Up, and other works
never before published by New Directions. On Booze portrays "The Jazz
Age" as Fitzgerald experienced it: roaring, rambunctious, and lush --
with quite a hangover.