From the prizewinning biographer of Richard Yates and John Cheever, here is the fascinating biography of Charles Jackson, the author of The Lost Weekend —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. Charles Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend —the story of five disastrous days in the life of alcoholic Don Birnam—was published in 1944 to triumphant success. Within five years it had sold nearly half a million copies in various editions, and was added to the prestigious Modern Library. The actor Ray Milland, who would win an Oscar for his portrayal of Birnam, was coached in the ways of drunkenness by the novel’s author—a balding, impeccably groomed middle-aged man who had been sober since 1936 and had no intention of going down in history as the author of a thinly veiled autobiography about a crypto-homosexual drunk. But The Lost Weekend was all but entirely based on Jackson’s own experiences, and Jackson’s valiant struggles fill these pages. He and his handsome gay brother, Fred (“Boom”), grew up in the scandal-plagued village of Newark, New York, and later lived in Europe as TB patients, consorting with aristocratic café society. Jackson went on to work in radio and Hollywood, was published widely, lived in the Hotel Chelsea in New York City, and knew everyone from Judy Garland and Billy Wilder to Thomas Mann and Mary McCarthy. A doting family man with two daughters, Jackson was often industrious and sober; he even became a celebrated spokesman for Alcoholics Anonymous. Yet he ultimately found it nearly impossible to write without the stimulus of pills or alcohol and felt his devotion to his work was worth the price. Rich with incident and character, Farther & Wilder is the moving story of an artist whose commitment to bringing forbidden subjects into the popular discourse was far ahead of his time. Fed up with the automatic assumption that his best-selling novel, The Lost Weekend (1944), was autobiographical, Charles Jackson (1903–68) once snapped to an interviewer, “It isn’t.” But it is, and Bailey finds the real-world analogue of virtually every incident in it in the course of what is less the life of an author than that of a charming human train wreck. A small man, handsome but billiard-bald in his early twenties, Jackson was tubercular and a closeted homosexual as well as an addict who popped pills when he was on the wagon. He was the spitting image of Don Birnam, Weekend’s hero, too, in his self-absorption and daydreaming, better at planning literary triumphs than achieving them. Yet everyone he ever knew, no matter how badly he stressed them, liked or, indeed, adored him, including his wife, two daughters, and loyal younger brother. He wrote only one good book, though, unlike Richard Yates and John Cheever, the alcoholic writers Bailey chronicled in the award-winning predecessors to this suavely written, magnetically readable, but less consequential biography. --Ray Olson Praise for Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson By Blake Bailey "A great American biography ... brilliant and gripping ... Mr. Bailey has made an author come alive in a way that is truly novelistic, has made him submit to becoming a character in a story. . . .a Greek myth crossed with a Sherwood Anderson tale. . . . That Blake Bailey should come along 45 years later and grant [fame to Charles Jackson] is a kind of miracle, one that we can all be grateful for."--Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal " "Arresting ... Bailey is the literary biographer of our generation.... [his] biography shows us the artfulness of Jackson's life and work: the self-consciouness, the refusal to take anything for granted. ... The publication of this new biography and the reprinting of the books themselves ignite the excitement once again, and Bailey has given us a writer who can, on every page, throw us out of our chairs."--Seth Lerer, San Francisco Chronicle" “Scrupulous and compassionate … As a portrait of the artist as a ruined man, Bailey’s account is a chilling addition to the museum of literary failure, to be mounted somewhere in the long hall between ‘The Crack-Up’ and ‘The Shining.’” --Donna Rifkind, New York Times Book Review   “The novelist Charles Jackson may not be as well known as subjects of Blake Bailey’s previous biographies … but he is no less fascinating. In Farther & Wilder … Mr. Bailey portrays his life with the same dogged attention to detail, literary panache and brilliant storytelling that he brought to those other subjects … Mr. Bailey’s triumph is in fleshing out both Jackson’s literary legacy and the man himself.”--Sarah Douglas, New York Observer   “A fascinating anatomy of failure.”--Carl Rollyson, The Star Tribune   "A once-celebrated American novelist wrestles with the Big Three writerly adversaries—substance abuse, repressed homosexuality, and social confor