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This author appeared at the 2009 festival. Please view the list of authors appearing at this year's festival or see our suggestions for similar authors below.
 Blake Bailey
Though John Cheever's fiction famously highlights the dark side of middle class America, his readers might still be surprised to learn just how turbulent Cheever's personal life actually was. In Cheever: A Life, Bailey reveals a troubled author whose body of work includes some of the twentieth century's most celebrated American literature, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, The Stories of John Cheever, to the acclaimed novel The Wapshot Chronicle, which won the National Book Award. With total access to Cheever's unpublished journals and a wide breadth of interviews with people close to the man, Bailey, who also wrote a celebrated biography of Richard Yates, illustrates a life of brilliance and excess. This seminal biography documents Cheever's career with a completionist's eye for detail, revealing a childhood scarred by his father's abuses and his family's financial turmoil, an adult life mired in alcoholism and self-loathing at his own latent bisexuality, and all the towering literary achievements in-between. Despite all of his insecurities, Cheever was so devoted to his craft that every morning early in his career, he'd dress for work and then retire to the basement of his apartment building, where "he'd doff his suit and write in his boxers until noon," as Bailey describes. The New York Times calls Cheever "a definitive, Dickensian rendering of a complete and complicated life, addictively readable and long overdue." Bailey began work on Cheever after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship. He also edited two collections of Cheever's work, John Cheever: Collected Stories & Other Writings and John Cheever: Complete Novels. His much-lauded biography, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, was a finalist for the National Book Award. As a former New Orleans resident and victim of Hurricane Katrina, Bailey recounted his life post-disaster for Slate magazine. He has since relocated to Virginia.
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