In retrospect—decades later—it is clear that these novels were speaking to a 1940s war-drenched culture in which traditional American norms and expectations of masculinity, heterosexuality, sexual relationships, gender roles, and even marriage were questioned and various alternatives explored. Women on the home-front now took on new social and economic responsibilities, and relationships were destabilized by millions of men going overseas. More importantly, men in the midst of battle—often facing the very real possibility of death—had to turn to one another for emotional support and often physical—sexual or not—intimacy. The idea, and ideal, that men should be emotionally restrained, not physically tender with one another, strong and steadfast (not to mention exclusively emotionally and physically heterosexual) was broken down by the enormous, and life-threatening, realities of war. It is no wonder that American readers of literary fiction were drawn to subject matter that explored new ways of being a man in the world.

The Fall of Valor fits clearly, and squarely, into this genre of post-war books about masculinity and queerness. But it is completely unique as well. When The Fall of Valor was published in 1946 Charles Jackson was already internationally famous—Mailer, Vidal, Jones and others dealing with homosexuality in their work were just starting their careers—after the publication of his first novel The Lost Weekend in 1944. The Lost Weekend, a wrenching novel of a closeted homosexual’s alcoholism, in Jackson’s lifetime sold over 100,000 cloth editions, half a million in paperback, and was translated into fourteen languages. (Its title also became a catchphrase in the English language.) A film based on the novel was released in 1945 and won four Academy Awards—including best picture, best director, and best actor—and grossed over $11,000,000 at the box office.

A serious fictional exploration of alcoholism was considered daring at the time, but for Jackson to follow this up with a novel about a married college professor who is struggling with his attraction to men—and his intense attraction to a handsome marine captain he meets on vacation—was certainly pushing boundaries, even with the substantial public interest in issues of sexuality and masculinity at the time. What sets The Fall of Valor apart from many of these other works is that aside from being “the powerful story of a man’s conflicting loves,” it is also the very modern psychological story of a marriage that has been slowing dying for years, the husband’s sexuality being a very small part of that. What Jackson does here—with piercing psychological insight and an unnerving instinct for exposing the rawness of human emotion—is to perfectly balance the story of a stagnating marriage with the exhilaration of a man experiencing the first wave of sexual and emotional excitement.