About the book
American travel writer William Seabrook entered Bloomingdale Asylum in New York to be treated for alcoholism, and this memoir records his experiences there. Sometimes titled Asylum (An Alcoholic Takes the Cure), it comes from a man who was a well-known journalist and explorer when he chose to commit himself. His account is frank and critical of himself, and it shows how addiction was treated before Alcoholics Anonymous and other modern programs existed. Harcourt Brace first published it in 1935. F. Scott Fitzgerald refers to it in The Crack-Up without naming it, and Bantam and later Dover reissued it.
Ryan Holiday put it on his list of 24 little-known books that can change a life, noting that Seabrook, then among the world's most famous journalists, described the asylum the way a travel writer describes a foreign place.
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Ryan Holiday (Founder/Brass Check)
In 1934, William Seabrook was one of the most famous journalists in the world. He was also an alcoholic. But there was no treatment for his disease. So he checked himself into an insane asylum. There, from the perspective of a travel writer, he described his own journey through this strange and foreign place. Today, you can’t read a page in the book without seeing him bump, unknowingly, into the basic principles of 12-step groups and then thwarted by well meaning doctors (like the one who decides he’s cured and can start drinking again). On a regular basis, he says things so clear, so self-aware that you’re stunned an addict could have written it–shocked that this book isn’t a classic American text. Yet all his books are out of print and hard to find. Two of my copies are first editions from 1931 and 1942. It breaks your heart to know that just a few years or decades later, his options (and outcome) would have been so very different (he eventually died of an opium overdose).
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