'Drawing from life . . . as you see it'

 

“[The writer] must essentially draw from life as he sees it, lives it, overhears it or steals it, and the truer the writer, perhaps the bigger the blackguard. He lives by biting the hand that feeds him.” – Charles R. Jackson

 

Born in New Jersey on April 6, 1903 Jackson wrote several bestselling novels, including The Lost Weekend, also adapted into an Academy Award-winning Best Picture.  The novel – his first – and subsequent film thrust Jackson into a limelight in which he wasn’t always comfortable, although he did enjoy a fairly distinguished lecture circuit career from the book and film successes.

 

At Syracuse University he studied journalism and wrote for a number of newspapers before gravitating to books – both writing and selling them.  He wrote several more novels, a number of well-received short stories, and had a very successful stint as a scriptwriter for radio soap operas.  

 

Hospitalized for a number of years with tuberculosis and alcoholism, Jackson took about a 15-year break before writing one more successful book, the semi-autobiographical novel A Second-Hand Life, shortly before his death in 1968.

 

During his long hiatus, Jackson blamed the demise more to his inability to handle his early successes rather than his  illnesses.  “The writer knows his own worth,” he lamented, “and to be overvalued can confuse and destroy him as an artist.”