Peter the Drunk

New York: Horace Liveright. Very Good. 1929. 2nd printing. Hardcover. NOISBN . (no dust jacket) [solid binding, moderate external wear, bumping and very slight fraying to bottom corners, one-time owner's signature on ffep]. Novel about the effect of the eponymous protagonist's constant imbibing on his marriage (hint: it's not good). On the very first page, he's "a little tight but not as tight as he had been," and from then on there's rarely a page in which he and/or his friends are either having a drink or talking about their drinking -- right up to the fade-out. As a contemporary reviewer noted, there is "so much liquor in this book that we felt slightly stewed ourself after reading it and had to lie down for half an hour." Most of the book is set in Louisville, Kentucky, although about the last one-third or so takes place in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. In a prefatory "Author's Note," the author acknowledges that the main character of the book is based on someone he had known at college and had encountered again a few years later, and that he was presenting him in fictional form "merely as a horrible example." .