We seem to be hearing a lot about sobriety these days. Fresh from magistrates’ court, restricted to picking up his guitar only twice a week, Pete Doherty has embarked on his first “alcohol-free” tour. Blur, too, have re-formed, but are far more likely to be found sipping tea in the Groucho Club and singing the virtues of therapy than ripping it up with their old partner in crime Damien Hirst, who quit booze several years ago after noticing that he was turning into Jeffrey Bernard. On Oprah, the guests talk of their higher powers and sport their 90-day sobriety chips; alcohol-detector ankle bracelets have made it as far as the latest Karl Lagerfeld catwalk.

“Am with sober friends and feel good,” Lindsay Lohan texted from rehab last year; “here now wearing marc jacobs pumps and a kate and kass dress, vintage chanel messenger and topshop tights and peace sign earrings from kaviar and kind.”

Self-destruction, it seems, is just so 20th century. Partly, it’s a reaction to the excesses of the previous decade: the Noughties have shaped up as Britpop, only without the hangover. The same thing happened at the end of the 1970s, when Elton John, Eric Clapton, Martin Scorsese, Lou Reed and Aerosmith climbed out of the wreckage and emerged, blinking, into the neon glare of the 1980s.

Partly, too, it has to do with the increased ferocity of the drugs. Janis Joplin managed to fit in four albums, with three bands, before overdosing on heroin in 1970; will Amy Winehouse ever complete her third album? And stars are getting sober younger. The days when Colonel Parker kept Elvis supplied with barbiturates are over; now, your manager is more likely to be staging your first intervention before you check into rehab, somewhere between your second single and your comeback album.

“Oh, Amy, rehab never looked so good, I can’t wait, I’m going back,” Eminem raps on his new album, Relapse, whose cover features an image of his face made up of little pills similar to the ones on which he overdosed in his bathroom last year. One consequence of all this is the rapper’s vaunted sobriety, as consumers are finally getting to put that hoary old myth connecting inebriation and creativity to the test. It was a bold enough experiment, you have to admit, lasting the best part of a century, in which any suffering artist worth his salt was systematically deranging his senses before noon, getting into the kind of bar fights that make a man feel truly alive, before shrugging off his mastodon hangover the next morning to pound away at his typewriter, or pelt his canvas, or use his teeth as a plectrum. The history of creative debauch has been written many times.

Less well known is the story of how that myth began to crumble. One date that would figure prominently is 1977, when the American short-story writer Raymond Carver, tiring of the endless shuffle between emergency room, courtroom and drying-out clinic, had his last drink. He then remarried and went on to write his best work, including the Pulitzer-nominated collection Cathedral. Gravy, he called it.

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.Gravy, these past ten years.Alive, sober, working, loving, andbeing loved by a good woman. Eleven years ago he was told he had six months to live at the rate he was going. And he was goingnowhere but down. So he changed his wayssomehow. He quit drinking! And the rest? After that it was all gravy, every minute of it ...

This was not what was in the script. Writers had got sober before, but they ended up writing wan hymns to their higher power, as John Berryman did, that got panned by the critics (“Under new management, Your Majesty”). Or they got sober at the end of their careers, like John Cheever, rather like someone turning off the lights before leaving. Carver’s second coming was the first time a writer had passed through the sound barrier and found not just that the air was breathable on the other side, but his work quantitatively improved. Nobody would be able to look at the final black canvases of Mark Rothko, or the last wispy exhalations of Samuel Beckett, or the pickled later output of Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald the same way again.

It’s hard to imagine what Beckett would have sounded like on Oprah with a 90-day sobriety chip in his pocket. (“I take it one day at a time. One day, followed by the next, as ineluctably it must, having no choice but to go on.”) The passing of one myth has seen the rise of another. The transformative story line of recovery, so perfectly attuned to the fibrillating rhythms of modern-day celebrity, has bequeathed us a new myth of hubris and redemption, in which the artists are struck down at the height of their fame, spirited back to the underworld from which they first came to do battle with their demons, before finally emerging victorious, reborn as saints and seers, charred and chastened by their spin on the Wheel of Fire.

After he went sober in 2003, Damien Hirst’s work underwent a marked shift: no more bisected animals and rotting skulls, and in their place a series of sculptures inspired by The Last Supper and some rather beautiful butterfly paintings. Scorsese, after nearly killing himself with cocaine during the making of Raging Bull, returned to smaller movies, before seeking to reset his spiritual equilibrium with films like The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun. Of course, it is possible to fall off the wagon; as with Scorsese’s GoodFellas, a film that feels more druggy than the films he made on drugs.

There will always be those who prefer the earlier, more inebriated work. When the singer-songwriter Cat Power abjured staggering round the stage drunk, dropping her guitar and abusing her fans, in favour of actual songs, clearly sung, with a proper brass section, some in the indie music press professed themselves unhappy. What had happened to the drunken, slutty Power of old? Some hardcore horror fans, too, have found fault with the sober Stephen King, whose work since he quit drinking has taken on a baggy therapeutic turn, more concerned with the exorcism of internal demons than, say, the gleaming fenders of a 1958 Plymouth Fury tearing up your lawn.

The jury is out, too, on the softer, mellower Eminem. “It’s not that angry, and it shouldn’t be, ’cause he’d be fake,” one of his backing singers said of the new album. “If he’s still talking the same shit, what would be the maturity in it? If he’s talking about how he’s broke, or wants to kill everybody, that won’t work any more. He’s happy now. The muthaf***er got some money.”