"A Literary One-Hit Wonder"

"After finishing the Yates and Cheever bios, Bailey tells the Weekly, he was a bit burned out and looking for a lighter subject. His first idea was to write a collection of mini-profiles of promising young writers who got off track and never made their literary mark—long-forgotten names like Nathan Asch, Calvin Canfield and Jackson. But when he read the editor's preface to The Lost Weekend and learned about Jackson's pathetic end at the Chelsea Hotel, he knew he'd found his next full-length subject: 'I had to get to the bottom of that,' he says. 'How did the author of The Lost Weekend end up like that?'"

Paul Teetor in the LA Weekly reviews Blake Bailey's Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson.