Drinkers with Writing Problems

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 West Coast – and their typewriters were blazing as they challenged the censors, crystalized the city and worked under the shadow of an ever-entrancing murder.

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 channeled the lonely beauty of a night in New Orleans. Finally, venture down a rabbit hole in search of the Big Easy’s lost genius of comedy. Born and raised in the city, he haunted drinking dens, wrote a masterpiece and wandered the same streets as a presidential assassin.

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 barrios and hill towns that he called home – and to the place where some are still searching for his body to this very day.

Season 2 opens with a return to the California Gold Rush and Nevada Silver Strike, exploring how these discoveries in the 19th 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, some funny, some tragic – have now seeped into the bones of bars, saloons and hotels that remain from northern California to western Nevada; and into a force we call the Literature of the West.

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, drink-loving half of that duo eventually started veering through darker doorways of the human mind.