Blake Bailey is the author of biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and a finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Prizes. His previous book, The Splendid Things We Planned, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.
"Bailey’s research is often revealing and vivid… Although Roth
would not have enjoyed some of the tumult that will now attend its
publication, he might have admired his biographer’s industry, even
his refusal to fall under his subject’s sway. The man who emerges
is a literary genius, constantly getting it wrong, loving others,
then hurting them, wrestling with himself and with language,
devoted to an almost unfathomable degree to the art of
fiction."
*David Remnick - The New Yorker*
"Bailey is a very good writer and a very good literary biographer.
A double-or triple-natured subject is not beyond him… What a story…
Bailey certainly lets the repellent in, and along with it comes the
man in his wholeness."
*James Parker - The Atlantic*
"Unassailable as to fact… clear-eyed… quickly moving… Philip Roth
seems as brightly people as a Victorian novel… What [Bailey] does
superbly… is chart Roth’s sexual and emotional life, and map its
effects on his work."
*Michael Gorra - The New York Review of Books*
"The 19th-century novel lives on. Its name today is Biography; its
nature is that of Dostoyevskian magnitude. And Blake Bailey’s
comprehensive life of Philip Roth — to tell it outright — is a
narrative masterwork both of wholeness and particularity, of crises
wedded to character, of character erupting into insight, insight
into desire, and desire into destiny."
*Cynthia Ozick - The New York Times Book Review*
"Meticulous, masterfully organized, and heroically
fair-minded."
*Sam Sacks - The Wall Street Journal*
"Magisterial’ and ‘definitive’…don’t do justice to Blake Bailey’s
years-in-the-making opus... Bailey meticulously conjures the career
of one of America’s literary titans, the devils and angels that
shaped his work."
*O, The Oprah Magazine*
"A wonderful book… Beautifully written and highly readable."
*Michael Schaub - The Boston Globe*
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
