Blake Bailey is the author of biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson, and he is currently the authorized biographer of Philip Roth. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His latest book, The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait, was one of five finalists for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography). Bailey lives in Virginia, where he is the Mina Hohenberg Darden Professor of Creative Writing at Old Dominion University.
