Charles Jackson lived a quintessentially tragic, sometime glamorous and tortured literary life - living in The Dakota, The Chelsea Hotel and dying at St Vincent's Hospital of complications of the tuberculosis he had decades earlier treated at a Swiss sanatorium. A queer writer, he struggled with writer's block, mental health challenges, and various addictions to pills and drink, while all the while carrying on a highly successful career as a radio and TV writer, and famous novelist. Born in America in 1903, he began binge-drinking during The Great Depression. In later life, he attempted suicide and was sent to the infamous Bellevue Hospital, in New York. Married, with two children, he nonetheless lived a complex, bisexual life, best understood by reading his works, now seen to be more autobiographical than they were known to be at time of publication.