Blake Bailey


Blake Bailey is an American writer. Bailey is widely known for his literary biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson. He is the editor of the Library of America omnibus editions of Cheever's stories and novels.

Background

Bailey grew up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and attended high school at Bishop McGuinness Catholic High School, where he was friends with another future author, Dan Fagin. He 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.
From 2010-2016 he was the Mina Hohenberg Darden Professor of Creative Writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He was succeeded by author Joe Jackson.

Career

After college, Bailey wrote occasional freelance 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.
In 2005, Bailey was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on his biography, Cheever: A Life, which won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award among other honors. Bailey also edited a two-volume edition of Cheever's work for the Library of America.
Bailey published his biography of the novelist Charles Jackson, Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson , as well as a memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait.
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. While Roth was alive, he gave Bailey exclusive access to papers, friends and family, and made himself available for extensive interviews.

Awards and honors