Drinkers with Writing Problems

It's a city that doesn't flinch - or forgive. Las Vegas found its halcyon days at the end of skimming rackets and growing criminal ambition, but the writers who tried to make sense of its story faced a wavering desert mirage of America's secrets. That reflection remains strong in the city's cocktail bars and craft distilleries, while its smokier rooms are haunted by memories of creative outcasts o...

Have a drink with the only troop of wild monkeys in Europe. The Royal Crown colony of Gibraltar remains one of the Old World's enigmas – a cauldron of cultures and empires simmering together under the low-lit flame of History itself. Gibraltar is also a port where weary sailors, restless soldiers and drifters engaged in espionage have found themselves stranded over time. Episode 9 explores how the...

Come along on a hike and pub crawl through the most spell-binding landscape in Britain's northwest: Writers have been gravitating to the Lake District for generations, their imaginations enthralled by its serene and stunning views, their senses on guard for the blustery, foreboding power of its skies. The district's dynamism fostered one of Literature's greatest partnerships; but the restless, dri...

Season 2 opens with a return to the California Gold Rush and Nevada Silver Strike, exploring how these discoveries in the 19 th century lured every kind of drifter and dreamer to America's lawless edge of the world. Through the dusty violence and ominous mineshaft darkness, three writers emerged to capture a brazen, boom-and-bust spirit of the age. Their own drink-soaked stories – some inspiring,...

Season 1 ends with a sojourn to the southern corners of Iberia, chasing the elusive memory of one of the greatest Spanish writers to ever take up the pen. He was a literary folk hero in the wine-splashed tapas bars from Seville to Granada; and when forces within the Spanish Civil War caused him to disappear, it set the stage for a national haunting as dark as any of his poetry. Travel to the barri...

In a place known for dark alleys, dream factories and California sunshine, there are a few bars and hotels that hold the secret to how one city captured the world's imagination. Take a stroll through those surviving landmarks, the places where a handful of writers watched Los Angeles rumble to life between Prohibition and the 1950s: They were hard-drinking personalities who changed the face of the...

Welcome to The City that Care Forgot, the place where an exiled teen once returned to study a spilling kaleidoscope of cocktails as he re-vamped gothic literature. In time, his connections to the South's strangest river port helped trigger a national obsession with the true crime genre. Then, explore how gin-distilling went legit in the birthplace of Jazz – and how it fueled a wordsmith who channe...

When a son of Scotland's most-medieval city channeled its legacies of vice and bloodshed into popular tales, he took inspiration from the link between its shadowy pub culture and innovations in urban brewing. Following his path through Edinburgh's old taverns reveals his influence on the city's growing stable of mystery writers. Further off shore, Scotland's famed whisky island is holding its own...

In Dublin, the story of an I.R.A. insurgent-turned-writer leads to historic watering holes where the city's oldest whiskeys flow. The man who first declared himself "a drinker with a writing problem" understood what distilled spirits mean to a culture's identity; but it was his understanding of how to overcome a violent past that makes his words especially relevant. Meanwhile, in Belfast, a small...