SOURCE: "After the Lost Generation: The Lost Weekend," in The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction, University of Massachusetts Press, 1994, pp. 135-57.

In the following essay, Crowley examines Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend (1944) as indicative of a shift away from the modernist perspective of alcoholism as a sign of the modern distemper and toward the concept of drunkenness as symptomatic of a disease.

When The Lost Weekend appeared in January 1944, Malcolm Lowry had been toiling for nearly a decade over successive drafts of Under the Volcano (1947), the magnum opus on which he had pinned his hopes of literary immortality. For Lowry, the true originality of this work consisted in his use of an alcoholic as a representative man, a symbol of the tragic modern condition. He was understandably devastated by the pre-emptive publication of Charles Jackson's novel, with its unprecedented account of a binge from...