Blake Bailey

“Fitzgerald's work was almost entirely out of print when 'The Lost Weekend' was published in 1944—even 'Gatsby' seemed well on its way…

— Blake Bailey

I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and thats very much the same ethos…

— Blake Bailey

The funniest novel you've never read. . . . Afternoon Men is a revelation to sophisticated readers of every stripe, but especially…

— Blake Bailey

I'm a huge fan of 'The Lost Weekend.' I have this dog-eared copy of the 1963 Time Reading Program edition, which was…

— Blake Bailey

“Largely to spare his feelings, she’d spoken in rather vague terms about wanting to “find herself,” and Yates concluded that she’d become…

— Blake Bailey

“Repeatedly Yates went berserk—raging over grievances old and new, hurling furniture at phantoms out of his past. The nurses who lived upstairs…

— Blake Bailey

My father was a golden boy from a very small town. He won a very prestigious law scholarship to NYU Law School,…

— Blake Bailey

“As Monica Yates pointed out, “Dad didn’t notice other people. He picked up on asshole people, he could figure people out in…

— Blake Bailey

“ The Lost Weekend was the only book, out of five books, that I wrote sober, without stimulus or sedative.”

— Blake Bailey

If possible, be funny.

— Blake Bailey

I keep three framed photographs on my desk: the latest school picture of my daughter; a photo of my wife getting her…

— Blake Bailey

“But what ultimately made Yates the scourge of copy editors was his simple aversion to criticism; any emendation in his manuscript, be…

— Blake Bailey

“One of the more curious paradoxes of Yates’s nature was his almost archaic courtliness toward women on the one hand, and his…

— Blake Bailey

“Not only had Yates continued to grow as a writer in terms of craft, but also philosophically, salvaging from the ruins of…

— Blake Bailey

I'm not an academic; I'm just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they've…

— Blake Bailey

I write literary biographies, so above all, I have to love the subject's books. But choosing a subject is tough.

— Blake Bailey

The whole psychoanalytical establishment in America at midcentury was geared to make people with homosexual proclivities feel like monsters, moral degenerates.

— Blake Bailey

“Vevers remarked on what struck them as Yates's peculiar attitude toward women: 'He expected them to drink a lot and be beautiful…

— Blake Bailey

“Yates’s determinism, like Flaubert’s, was a matter of knowing his characters well enough to know their fates, and making the reader see…

— Blake Bailey

“There were other times, fortunately, when he knew better. “All I write about is family,” Elizabeth Cox told him. “That’s all there…

— Blake Bailey

“But Yates was desperate enough to put aside his anxiety and give teaching a try. He could think of no more demoralizing…

— Blake Bailey

“In other words Yates had remembered the lesson of his first great master, Fitzgerald—namely, that people rarely say what they mean, and…

— Blake Bailey

With literary biographies, you're either shelved with other biographies or next to your subject's fiction.

— Blake Bailey

“He loved the idea that he was mentally ill,” said his daughter Monica, “and hated the idea he was an alcoholic”—that is,…

— Blake Bailey

To be a good biographer, you have to be an empiricist. You know, you have to gather the evidence, you have to…

— Blake Bailey