The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson

Prizewinning biographer Blake Bailey talks about his new biography of Charles Jackson, the author of The Lost Weekend, the story of five disastrous days in the life of alcoholic Don Birnam, which was published in 1944 and was very successful. Jackson was a doting family man with two daughters, and was often industrious and sober, but he found it nearly impossible to write without pills or alcohol. Bailey’s book Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson looks at a writer whose life and work encapsulated what it meant to be an addict and a closeted gay man in mid-century America, and what one had to do with the other.