Blake Bai­ley is the author of biogra­phies of John Cheev­er, Richard Yates, and Charles Jack­son. He is the recip­i­ent of a Guggen­heim Fel­low­ship and an Award in Lit­er­a­ture from the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts and Let­ters, win­ner of the Nation­al Book Crit­ics Cir­cle Award and the Fran­cis Park­man Prize from the Soci­ety of Amer­i­can His­to­ri­ans, and a final­ist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Prizes. His pre­vi­ous book, The Splen­did Things We Planned, was a final­ist for the Nation­al Book Crit­ics Cir­cle Award in Auto­bi­og­ra­phy. He lives in Vir­ginia with his wife and daughter.