Blake Bailey is the author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, a finalist for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on his biography, Cheever: A Life, which won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Prizes. Cheever was also named Best Adult Nonfiction Book of 2009 by Booklist, one of Ten Best Books by Publishers Weekly and Wall Street Journal, one of Ten Best Nonfiction Books by Time and Entertainment Weekly, and was a New York Times Notable Book and on many other Best of the Year lists. He also edited a two-volume edition of Cheever’s work for The Library of America, and in 2010 received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Bailey’s articles and reviews have appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Republic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Slate, Bookforum, The Believer, Vice, Spy, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He’s been writer-in-residence at The College of William & Mary and Old Dominion, where he was also the Mina Hohenberg Darden Professor of Creative Writing from 2010 to 2016. Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson was published by Knopf in 2013. The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography.
Bailey’s definitive biography of Philip Roth was published in 2021.
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