Charles Jackson—as brilliant an artist as he was—led a sad life. Chronic alcoholism and a Seconal addiction impeded his ability to write quickly. He joined AA, saw psychoanalysts, attempted suicide several times, entered rehab, suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease from heavy smoking, and was possibly bipolar. Like John Grandin he was married and had two children, but was homosexual—and fairly openly so in his last decades—although never able to find men who could fit into his life. He and his wife Rhoda (who was committed to him as a person and an artist) separated and he had a series of male companions including, for the last year of his life, the faithful Stanley Zednik, a Czech emigré twenty years his junior who saved him from several suicide attempts. He died of a final suicide attempt in 1968 at the age of 65.

The Lost Weekend and The Fall of Valor are clearly, in part, autobiographical. But they really don’t tell us much of Jackson’s life or why he was virtually forgotten as a major American novelist after his death. Jackson’s writing is as gripping, valiant, and moving today as it was during his lifetime. While other writers—gay and straight—of homosexual themes such as James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Calder Willingham went on to long, fully realized careers and are remembered today, Jackson—as famous as he was in the 1940s and 1950s—has faded. It is ironic that in many ways The Fall of Valor broke the ground for the American novel to deal with these themes of sexuality, death, war, and masculinity, and has now fallen into obscurity while The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity, and The City and the Pillar are known today. This new edition will introduce this novel, and Charles Jackson, to a new generation of readers.

Michael Bronski

June 2016

Michael Bronski is Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender, Sexuality at Harvard University. His Queer History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2011) won the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Best Nonfiction as well as the 2011 American Library Association Stonewall Israel Fishman Award for Best Nonfiction. Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press) won the 2003 Lammy Award for Best Anthology. His last two books have been “‘You Can Tell Just By Looking’ and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People” (Beacon Press, 2013) (coauthored with Ann Pellegrini and Michael Amico) and Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics (Beacon Press, 2015) coauthored with Kay Whitlock. He is now at work on a YA edition of A Queer History of the United States which will be published next year. He has been involved in gay liberation as a political organizer, writer, editor, publisher, and theorist since 1969.