With the publication of his best-known work, The Lost Weekend, on 27 January 1944, Charles Jackson reached the pinnacle of commercial and critical fame. The novel was acclaimed as a "masterpiece of psychological precision" by Phillip Wylie in The New York Times Book Review (30 January 1944) for its realistic depiction of alcoholism as displayed through the protagonist of the novel, Don Birnam. Indeed, the portrayal in the novel of the alcoholic with his attendant self-destruction, delusion, and moral decay shocked its readers with "the impact of a sledge-hammer." In The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction (1994), one of the few critical studies to consider the novel in detail, John W. Crowley observes that it marks "a major shift in the representation of alcoholism in American literature . . . it neither denies the alcoholism of the protagonist nor elevates him into a culture hero," as did the novels of some of...