(April 6th, 1903 — September 21st, 1968)

Charles Reginald Jackson was an American author. He is best remembered for his book The Lost Weekend.

Jackson was born in New Jersey and grew up in New York. During his childhood, his older sister and younger brother were killed in a car accident. While he was attending Syracuse University, he had a sexual encounter with another man in his fraternity and was brought to public disgrace for the incident.

As a young man, he worked as a newspaper editor and a bookseller before contracting severe tuberculosis. Because of his illness, Jackson spent several years confined to sanatoriums. He considered those years as a catalyst for his alcoholism.

Jackson abused many substances in his lifetime, including alcohol, cigarettes, sleeping pills, and barbiturates. He struggled to find work during the Great Depression and drank heavily. In 1938, he married Rhoda Booth, a magazine writer, and then began to write as a career.

Over the next fifteen years, he wrote four novels and one short story collection to mixed reviews and sales. Throughout his life, he struggled violently with addiction but also with accepting his own sexuality. He separated from his wife, was estranged from his family, relapsed several times into both illness and addiction, and eventually began to live with a male lover before committing suicide by overdose.

Jackson died in 1968, one year after publishing his fifth novel. At the time of his death, he was working on a sequel to the lost weekend.