Arthur, Stanley Clisby | The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails

(1881–1963), was the first person to pay serious attention to the origin and the history of the cocktail and of American mixed drinks in general. He is a particularly apt figure to stand at the head of the field of cocktail history in that his writing on the topic, contained in his 1937 book, Famous New Orleans Drinks and how to Mix ’Em, encompasses both the genre’s (rare) strengths and its (common) faults. Arthur, a newspaper reporter and photographer by training from Merced, California, parlayed his wildlife photographs and interest in John Audubon into an appointment first as Louisiana’s state ornithologist, in 1915, then as director of the state Department of Wildlife, and then, in 1934, as the regional director of the Federal Survey of Archives under the Works Progress Administration.

The last position, which led to Famous New Orleans Drinks, grew out of his archival research on Audubon and also spawned two other books, Old Families of Louisiana (1931) and Old New Orleans: A History of the Vieux Carré (1936). Like them, his drinks book was lively, anecdotal, and detailed, offering historical commentary on just about every drink. No book had done that before, and much of what he wrote contains invaluable nuggets of history. But Arthur was never a particularly meticulous researcher, and the book is riddled with easily avoidable errors. Worse, he was prone not only to jumping to conclusions and printing supposition as fact but also to altering the evidence to support his conclusion, as when he omitted the identifier “Stoughton’s” from a description of the bitters used in an early New Orleans cocktail so that he could imply that Peychaud’s bitters were used in the drink. Unfortunately, these faults have been perpetuated in the genre he did so much to found, but so, on occasion, have his breezy style, his wit, and his deft hand with an anecdote.