Blake Bailey is the author of acclaimed biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Philip Roth. He has written for a number of magazines, newspapers, and scholarly publications. He lives in Waldo, Florida, with his wife Mary.
"The arrival of Blake Bailey's great, perceptive, heartbreaking, Yates biography is a landmark event." --The New York Times "[A] tremendous book...It's a storytelling success that Bailey can turn Yates's long, slow grind toward obscurity into a fabulous and often hysterical read.... Yates rises up as something he never allowed in his fiction: a hero." --San Francisco Chronicle "Compulsively readable...Indispensable...Excellent in itself, it records, with photographic accuracy, where Yates's obsessively autobiographical fiction originated." --The New York Times Book Review "[A] meticulously researched, judicious, and critically perceptive biography...Bailey's version of Yates's life proves to be its own kind of masterpiece, as gripping as the best of Yates's novels, and more inspiring than sad." --The Boston Globe
British critic Paul Connolly once called Richard Yates "America's finest forgotten author," and Norman Podheretz referred to him as our most "unfairly neglected author." Best-remembered for his novels Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, which contain some of the most unflinching and unsettling portraits of 20th-century middle-class life, Yates developed a reputation as a writer's writer. Drawing on letters and other archival materials, Bailey (The Sixties) offers the first in-depth glimpse into Yates's tormented psyche and brilliant work, chronicling his life from a childhood influenced by his mother's grandiose artistic schemes and smothering love to an adulthood marked by depression, debauchery, and disappointments. Bailey plumbs the thematic depths of Yates's stories and novels, using them to demonstrate the various ways in which Yates's art entwined itself with his life. In exhaustive detail, he narrates Yates's steady descent into an inferno of alcoholism and manic depression, even as the writer was carving out a space for himself in American letters. Bailey also traces Yates's influences to Flaubert and Fitzgerald and discusses his influence on students like Tony Earley. The overabundance of banal detail sometimes makes this book a bit tiring to read, but overall it has all the hallmarks of a definitive biography, especially with its authenticity validated by the Yates family's cooperation. For all literature collections.-Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
"The arrival of Blake Bailey's great, perceptive, heartbreaking, Yates biography is a landmark event." --The New York Times "[A] tremendous book...It's a storytelling success that Bailey can turn Yates's long, slow grind toward obscurity into a fabulous and often hysterical read.... Yates rises up as something he never allowed in his fiction: a hero." --San Francisco Chronicle "Compulsively readable...Indispensable...Excellent in itself, it records, with photographic accuracy, where Yates's obsessively autobiographical fiction originated." --The New York Times Book Review "[A] meticulously researched, judicious, and critically perceptive biography...Bailey's version of Yates's life proves to be its own kind of masterpiece, as gripping as the best of Yates's novels, and more inspiring than sad." --The Boston Globe
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