The Drinking Life

Literary taste is a mercurial thing, but the Fox Head, the preferred tavern of Iowa MFAs going back many years, has weathered the caprice of faddish loyalties because it offers the dypsomaniac something no other bar in Iowa City can: a location on the same downtown block as Mercy Hospital. Nota bene: Writers drink a lot. When Dylan Thomas visited the workshop in the 1950s, he outdid himself, tumbling down three flights of stairs in a drunken swoon, according to legend. So what? you might be howling--Thomas did plenty of stuff like that. Bear in mind this is Iowa City. Five decades later you'd still be pressed to find a building higher than two stories.