On this special edition of Between the Covers, we talk with Blake Bailey, author of the new book Philip Roth: The Biography, just out from W. W. Norton.
Blake is a master of literary biography. In addition to the new book on Philip Roth, one of America’s greatest novelists, Blake’s subjects have included John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson. He's 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 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and a finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Prizes. Blake's most recent book, the memoir The Splendid Things We Planned, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography.
As Cynthia Ozick writes on the cover of the New York Times Book Review: “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 to desire, and desire into destiny.”
Author photo courtesy of Nancy Crampton
- KBOO