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[10], 254, [4] pages. Frontis illustration. Signed by the author sticker on front of DJ. Signed by the author on the title page. Blake Bailey (born July 1, 1963) is an American writer. Bailey is known for his literary biographies of Richard Yates, John Cheever, Charles Jackson, and Philip Roth. He is the editor of the Library of America omnibus editions of Cheever's stories and novels. In an interview with The New York Times published on November 17, 2012, Philip Roth said that Bailey was his official biographer and at work on that project.[7] While Roth was alive, he gave Bailey exclusive access to papers, friends and family, and made himself available for extensive interviews This work won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The Splendid Things We Planned is Bailey's darkly funny account of growing up in the shadow of an erratic and increasingly dangerous brother, an exhilarating and sometimes harrowing story that culminates in one unforgettable Christmas. Though a memoir, this literary biography reveals the gripping true-life novel at the core of the author's own experience. A brother's lament, a hard-won, clear-eyed view of one family's tortured history, The Splendid Things We Planned is everything we hope for in a modern memoir. Blake Bailey's triumph here is both personal and literary: A beautiful book, rising out of the ruins. Meet the Baileys: Burck, a prosperous lawyer once voted the American Legion's Citizen of the Year in his tiny hometown of Vinita, Oklahoma; his wife Marlies, who longs to recapture her festive life in Greenwich Village as a pretty young German immigrant, fresh off the boat; their addled son Scott, who repeatedly crashes the family Porsche; and Blake, the younger son, trying to find a way through the storm. You're gonna be just like me, a drunken Scott taunts him. You're gonna be worse. Blake Bailey has been hailed as addictively readable and praised for his ability to capture lives compellingly and in harrowing detail. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: It seems fitting that biographer Bailey tells the story of his own life by chronicling his brother Scott's alcoholism and drug addiction, which causes him to descend into violence and madness. Told in chronological order, starting with the marriage of his straight-laced lawyer father to his bohemian, German-immigrant mother, Bailey's story captures the contradictions and tensions that simmer just below the surface of the family, as they try to live a normal suburban life in Oklahoma. But as Scott goes from being a self-absorbed teen to a pothead, college dropout, and junkie, the family dynamic unravels, breaking up the marriage as the author himself heads toward alcoholism, debauchery, and ennuiâ "though not to his brother's depths. But this is Scott's story, and Bailey tells it wonderfully, in a tragicomic tone that slowly reveals the true depths to which his older brother has sunk. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated].
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