Selden D. Bacon claimed ancestry to
Sir Francis Bacon from several generations back. His father, Selden Bacon, was a constitutional attorney who argued against the constitutionality of
Prohibition (the
18th amendment) in the
Supreme Court of the United States. He taught sociology at
Pennsylvania State College (today Penn State University) from 1937 to 1939 and then at Yale. He became full professor at Yale in 1956. After his contact with Yale researchers at the Laboratory of Applied Physiology (LAP), which later became the Yale Center of Alcohol Studies, he was invited to join as a part-time researcher and part-time sociology instructor. In 1945, he published a review on the movie
The Lost Weekend, whose main character was an
alcoholic, in the Yale Center's
journal. He was appointed director of the LAP and the Summer School of Alcohol Studies from 1950 to 1962. He was also a chairperson to the Connecticut Commission on Alcoholism. In 1962, the Center and Bacon as its director moved to Rutgers University. He retired in 1975. ==Selected publications==