The classic tale of one man’s struggle with alcoholism, this revolutionary novel remains Charles Jackson’s best-known book—a daring autobiographical work that paved the way for contemporary addiction literature. It is 1936, and on the East Side of Manhattan, a would-be writer named Don Birnam decides to have a drink. And then another, and then another, until he’s in the midst of what becomes a five-day binge. The Lost Weekend moves with unstoppable speed, propelled by a heartbreaking but unflinching truth. It catapulted Charles Jackson to fame, and endures as an acute study of the ravages of alcoholism, as well as an unforgettable parable of the condition of the modern man.

Jane Wyman also delivers a powerful performance as his faithful girlfriend, Helen St. James, whose selfless love offers Birnam a hope of redemption.".

The personal assistant to John and Yoko describes the couple's separation and the intense period of enormous creativity during which she lived, worked, and fell in love with Lennon, sharing with him a rocky romance. Reprint.

The Lost Weekend' is a gripping story of a talented but alcoholic writer Don Birnam who is a sensitive, charming, and educated man. It follows the struggling writer's efforts to survive a weekend in Manhattan. This work was praised for its intense realism and most acute portrayal of alcoholism, reflecting the writer's experience with alcohol.

The Lost Weekend is Charles R. Jackson's first novel, published in 1944. The story of a skilled however alcoholic creator turned into praised for its powerful realism, intently reflecting the writer’s very own revel in of alcoholism, from which he was temporarily cured. It served as the basis for the classic 1945 Oscar triumphing movie edition. Set in a rundown community of Manhattan in 1936, the radical explores a five-day alcoholic binge. Don Birnam, a binge drinker primarily of rye, fancies himself as a writer. He lapses into overseas terms and quotes Shakespeare even as attempting to steal a woman's purse, trying to pawn a typewriter for ingesting cash, and smashing his face on a banister. That coincidence receives him checked into an “alcoholic ward.” There, a counselor advises Birnam on the nature of alcoholism: There isn't always any treatment, except simply preventing. And how lots of them can do this? They don't need to, you see. When they feel awful like this fellow here, they suppose they need to forestall, but they don't, actually. They can not bring themselves to confess they are alcoholics, or that liquor's got them licked. They trust they could take it or go away it on my own — in order that they take it. If they do stop, out of worry or whatever, they cross without delay into such a country of euphoria and well-being that they come to be over-confident. They're rid of drink, and experience sure sufficient of themselves so as to start once more, promising they will take one, or at the maximum, and — well, then it becomes the same old tale another time. Perhaps the best aspect preserving Birnam from consuming himself to death is his lady friend Helen, a selfless and incorruptible girl who tolerates his conduct out of love. Helen does, however, upbraid him with the phrases: “I have not were given time to be neurotic.” No faster has he started to get over his “Lost Weekend" than he contemplates killing Helen's maid to get the key to the liquor cabinet. He has some drinks and crawls into bed questioning, “Why did they make the sort of fuss?”

To what extent have Hollywood feature films shaped the meanings that Americans attach to alcoholics, their families, and the alcoholic condition? To what extent has the mass culture of the movie industry itself been conceptually shaped by a broad, external societal discourse? Norman Denzin brings to his life-long study of alcoholism a searching interest in how cultural texts signify and lend themselves to interpretation within a social nexus. Both historical and diachronic in his approach, Denzin identifies five periods in the alcoholism films made between 1932 and the end of the 1980s, and offers a detailed critical reading of thirty-seven films produced during these six decades. "Professor Denzin has produced a searching and provocative interpretation of more than a half-century of Hollywood's social and personal construction of the problem drinker in America. Readable by both lay persons and specialists, Denzin's book provides us with the most comprehensive understanding of this topic to date."--Stanford M. Lyman, Robert J. Morrow Eminent Scholar in Social Science, Florida Atlantic University "An eminent sociologist and leading authority on alcoholism, Denzin also writes skillfully about films as films and is comfortable with postmodern interpretive theoryà a genuinely interdisciplinary work of the first order." --Robert L. Carringer, author, The Making of Citizen Kane "Denzin has gone on an exhaustive bar-crawl through hundreds of movies, returning with evidence that the film about drinking is a genre of its own. He writes from sound knowledge about alcoholism--which, unlike other diseases, is frequently viewed with bittersweet romanticism."--Roger Ebert Norman K. Denzin is professor of sociology, cinema studies, and interpretive theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was awarded the George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. He is the author of several books, including Screening Race: Hollywood and a Cinema of Racial Violence, The Recovering Alcoholic, Interpretive Ethnography, Images of Postmodernism: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema, and Interpretive Interactionism.