This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. In 1973, a celebrated writer reportedly knocked on a new colleague’s door and held out a glass. “Pardon me,” he said by way of introduction. “I’m John Cheever. Could I borrow some scotch?” Raymond Carver did not share Cheever’s authorial renown at that time—that would come later. And he did not have scotch. He had only Smirnoff. In her 2013 book about writers and drinking, the British critic Olivia Laing describes how Cheever and Carver would drive to a nearby liquor store, stock up, and take alternating swigs of a bottle on their way to teach morning classes at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Stories about the use of excessive alcohol in the creative process can be found in The Atlantic’s earliest years. In 1868, for example, one article proposed that “artists, writers, and actors” were particularly prone to the “malady” of alcoholism “before they had any recognized place in the world.” Another noted that …