[2] His family moved to Newark, New York in 1907, and nine years later his older sister, Thelma, and younger brother, Richard, were killed while riding in a car that was struck by an express train.

[3] As a young man he worked as an editor for local newspapers and in various bookstores in Chicago and New York prior to falling ill with tuberculosis.

[7] While working on The Lost Weekend, Jackson earned as much as $1000 per week writing scripts for the radio soap opera Sweet River, about a widowed minister and his two sons.

The Academy Award winning film was directed by Billy Wilder and starred Ray Milland in the lead role of Don Birnam.

Jackson's second published novel of the 1940s, titled The Fall of Valor, was released in 1946 and takes its name from a passage in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

The Fall of Valor received mixed reviews, and, though sales were respectable, was considerably less successful than Jackson's famous first novel.

Jackson's The Outer Edges was released in 1948 and dealt with the gruesome rape and murder of two girls in Westchester County, New York.

Jackson's later works included two collections of short stories, The Sunnier Side: Twelve Arcadian Tales (1950) and Earthly Creatures (1953).

He adapted Evelyn Waugh's short story "The Man Who Liked Dickens" for the General Electric Theater program as "High Green Wall".

Naked City adapted his short story for the episode "The Other Face of Goodness" in 1958 about a serial killer starring James Franciscus and John McIntire.

In the early 1960s, three of his short stories appeared in McCall's magazine but Jackson still struggled with periodic bouts of writer's block.

Jackson moved to the Hotel Chelsea and resumed work on A Second-Hand Life, a novel that he began writing some 15 years earlier.