Charles R. Jackson was born in 1903 in Summit, New Jersey. He graduated from Newark High School and briefly attended Syracuse University, dropping out in his freshman year following a sexual encounter with a member of his fraternity, an event he later fictionalized in The Lost Weekend (1944). After high school, Jackson worked as an editor for the local newspaper, the Newark Courier, and also worked at bookstores in Chicago and New York before falling ill with tuberculosis. From 1927 to 1931, Jackson spent most of his time in sanatoriums, including two years in Davos, Switzerland, and though he was eventually cured he was left with only one lung and a drinking habit.

Returning to New York at the height of the Great Depression, Jackson was unable to find steady work or get any of his writing published, leading him to drink more heavily, until he became his own model for Don Birnham, the protagonist of The Lost Weekend, the story of a closeted gay man’s struggles with alcohol addiction that catapulted Jackson to critical and financial success. The book sold over 600,000 copies, was translated into fourteen languages and was adapted by Billy Wilder for an Academy Award-winning 1945 film version.

Jackson followed up this triumph with The Fall of Valor (1946), which sold well but received mixed reviews, with many critics expressing admiration for Jackson’s literary skill but disgust over the book’s frank treatment of homosexual themes. A third novel, The Outer Edges (1948), was less successful, and by 1950, Jackson, who had been sober for over a decade, had begun to drink heavily again. Jackson published volumes of short stories in 1950 and 1953 but then largely vanished from the literary scene until A Second-Hand Life (1967). This novel reached the bestseller lists but was received poorly by critics. Disappointed by the novel’s reception and his own declining health, Jackson attempted suicide several times and fatally overdosed on barbiturates in September 1968.