Splendid Things We Planned (Bailey) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—July 1, 1963
• Where—Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• Education—B.A., Tulane University
• Awards—National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in Norfolk, Virginia


Blake Bailey is an American writer 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—and was a 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Early years and career
Bailey grew up in Oklahoma City and went to college at Tulane University, from which he graduated in 1985. Following graduation, he 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. Published in 2003, the biography became a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 2005, Bailey was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on his biography, Cheever: A Life, which then 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. He also edited a two-volume edition of Cheever's work for the Library of America.

In 2010, Bailey received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That year he also served as a judge for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and, in 2012, for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.

In an interview with the New York Times (11/17/2012), Philip Roth said that Bailey was his official biographer and at work on that project. Recently Bailey published his biography of the novelist Charles Jackson, Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, as well as a 2014 memoir of his own growing up years, The Splendid Things We Planned.

He is married to Mary Brinkmeyer, a psychologist at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth. Together they have a daughter. The family lost their house and most of their possessions in the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, an experience he wrote about in a series of articles for Slate, the online magazine.

Bailey is currently the Mina Hohenberg Darden Professor of Creative Writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/15/2014.)