Blake Bailey (born July 1, 1963)

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Blake Bailey (born July 1, 1963 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) is an American writer. Bailey is widely known for his literary biographies of Richard Yates, Charles Jackson, and John Cheever. He is the editor of the Library of America omnibus editions of Cheever's stories and novels — and in 2009, Bailey was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Bailey grew up in Oklahoma City and went to college at Tulane University, from which he graduated in 1985.

He is married to Mary Brinkmeyer, a psychologist at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth. Together they have a daughter. Bailey is a tennis enthusiast.

Bailey and his family lost their house and most of their possessions in Hurricane Katrina, an experience he wrote about in a series of articles for Slate.

He is currently the Mina Hohenberg Darden Professor of Creative Writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

After college, Bailey wrote occasional free-lance pieces and taught gifted eighth-graders at a magnet school in New Orleans. After publishing a long critical profile of Richard Yates, Bailey contracted to write a full-length biography of the novelist, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (2003), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 2005, Bailey was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on the biography, Cheever: A Life, which won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Bailey has also edited a two-volume edition of Cheever's work for the Library of America. In 2010, he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He served as a judge for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography in 2012.

In an interview with the New York Times published on November 17, 2012, Philip Roth said that Bailey was his official biographer and at work on that project.

In March 2013, Bailey published his biography of the novelist Charles Jackson, Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Bailey

Further Readings:

Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson by Blake Bailey
Publisher Knopf; First Edition edition (March 19, 2013)
Language English
ISBN-10 030727358X
ISBN-13 978-0307273581
Amazon: Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson
Amazon Kindle: Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson

From the prizewinning biographer of Richard Yates and John Cheever, here is the fascinating biography of Charles Jackson, the author of The Lost Weekend—a writer whose life and work encapsulated what it meant to be an addict and a closeted gay man in mid-century America, and what one had to do with the other.

Charles Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend—the story of five disastrous days in the life of alcoholic Don Birnam—was published in 1944 to triumphant success. Within five years it had sold nearly half a million copies in various editions, and was added to the prestigious Modern Library. The actor Ray Milland, who would win an Oscar for his portrayal of Birnam, was coached in the ways of drunkenness by the novel’s author—a balding, impeccably groomed middle-aged man who had been sober since 1936 and had no intention of going down in history as the author of a thinly veiled autobiography about a crypto-homosexual drunk. But The Lost Weekend was all but entirely based on Jackson’s own experiences, and Jackson’s valiant struggles fill these pages. He and his handsome gay brother, Fred (“Boom”), grew up in the scandal-plagued village of Newark, New York, and later lived in Europe as TB patients, consorting with aristocratic café society. Jackson went on to work in radio and Hollywood, was published widely, lived in the Hotel Chelsea in New York City, and knew everyone from Judy Garland and Billy Wilder to Thomas Mann and Mary McCarthy. A doting family man with two daughters, Jackson was often industrious and sober; he even became a celebrated spokesman for Alcoholics Anonymous. Yet he ultimately found it nearly impossible to write without the stimulus of pills or alcohol and felt his devotion to his work was worth the price. Rich with incident and character, Farther & Wilder is the moving story of an artist whose commitment to bringing forbidden subjects into the popular discourse was far ahead of his time.