Here’s a statistic you won’t pick up in English 101: Of eight native-born Americans awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, five were alcoholics, including Sinclair Lewis and Eugene O’Neill.

“Alcohol is a factor if not the central focus of the three top modern novelists – Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald,” says Michael Carolan, an M.F.A. candidate and instructor at the University of Massachusetts. “As novelists they were addressing how man lived in the 20th century, and the answer was, ‘through drinking.’ ”

Examining alcoholism and madness in literature and film