Canceled Lives - by Blake Bailey (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A canceled bestselling author's highly personal account of his public scandal--a scandal that was reported on the front page of the New York Times and throughout the world.

Blake Bailey grew up in the shadow of his father, Burck, an eminent litigator--president of the Oklahoma Bar Association and widely considered a sort of real-life Atticus Finch: "His conduct, honesty, integrity, and courtesy best exemplify and represent the highest standards of the legal profession," his colleagues commended him in a 1989 award citation.

As for Blake, he was a late bloomer who finally came into his own as a writer. His fourth literary biography, Philip Roth, was published on April 6, 2021, and hailed as "a narrative masterwork" by Cynthia Ozick on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. The 900-page book debuted at #12 on the Times Nonfiction Bestseller list.

But success came at a terrible price: because of revelations in Bailey's biography, many were calling for Roth and his work to be "canceled," while others thought Bailey had been overly sympathetic and even "complicitous" with his subject's worst failings. Soon rumors exploded on the internet about Bailey's own private life, and within days he himself was roundly canceled.

Canceled Lives is the story of a father and son who had much in common--for better and for worse--and who supported each other in the midst of terrible family strife, including the drug addiction and suicide of Blake's older brother, Scott. Having achieved a success in life that Blake, at least, never expected, both father and son were ravaged by the ordeal of Blake's spectacular public humiliation.

Review Quotes

"I was struck by the way the author combines the poignancy of decay with his gift for dryly comic observation ... This is as interesting - and cautionary - a study of the mechanics of cancel culture as we are likely to read." --Christopher Sandford, The Spectator

"Bailey's strength lies in his ability to capture people's lives on the page: to make a word worth a thousand pictures. This ability, which earned him the role of [Philip] Roth's official biographer, shines through in the memoir. ... Roth's legacy is now permanently bound to Bailey's like a DNA double helix with Y-chromosomal alleles." --Sheluyang Peng, Tablet Magazine

"It seems like a good time to perform some more painful soul-searching about #MeToo's deeper premises. A new piece of evidence, Canceled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me ... offers a valuable opportunity to probe the depths." --Valerie Stivers, Unherd

"Searching and articulate." --Nat Segnit, Times Literary Supplement

"[In Canceled Lives, Bailey] tells the story of his fall from being a globetrotting speaker and one of the most respected biographers in the world to a ghostwriter living in an old friend's pool house in Oklahoma, and he does it all in an idiom that is at once wry and graceful, playful and self-referential, stitching together high and low styles masterfully." --Michael Patrick Pearson, New York Journal of Books

"Bailey had never been and still has never been charged with a crime, much less convicted of one. Nonetheless, W.W. Norton, in a historic act of censorship, 'permanently' removed Bailey's comprehensive study of American novelist Philip Roth, Philip Roth: The Biography, from print. Bailey has now written and published a compelling reply to the slanderers, Canceled Lives--My Father, My Scandal, and Me, which deserves a broad audience. Unlike many of the #MeToo victims, Bailey has decided to fight and set the record straight. This is an entirely welcome and healthy development, a contribution to the cleansing of the cultural atmosphere." --David Walsh, World Socialist website

"Blake Bailey is the best literary biographer in America. The swiftness of his cancellation and that of his masterful Roth biography revealed the degree to which lemming-like groupthink has permeated our cultural establishment. Canceled Lives vividly depicts the toll such heedless actions take on individuals and families." --Brooke Allen, author of Twentieth Century Attitudes: Literary Powers in Uncertain Times and Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers

"Blake Bailey is a fine writer who writes painfully in Canceled Lives about having his biography of Philip Roth removed from distribution by its publisher. What an astonishing comedown after receiving a wonderful front-page review in the New York Times book section by Cynthia Ozick! Canceled Lives tells the whole sad story and the personal pain Bailey suffered. His publisher had no right to do what they did to him. This book about accusations of terrible behavior and its effect on a book and its author goes beyond memoir and reveals the profound harm such assertions can cause. It deserves a wide and discerning audience." --Martin Garbus, Prominent First Amendment Lawyer

Praise for PHILIP ROTH: THE BIOGRAPHY

"Blake Bailey's comprehensive life of Philip Roth--to tell it outright--is a narrative masterwork. . . . As in a novel, what is seen at first to be casual chance is revealed at last to be a steady and powerfully demanding drive. . . . Under Bailey's strong light what remains on the page is one writer's life as it was lived, and--almost--as it was felt."
--Cynthia Ozick, New York Times Book Review

"Bailey is industrious, rigorous, and uncowed. . . . Although Roth would not have enjoyed some of the tumult that will now attend its publication, he might have admired his biographer's . . . refusal to fall under his subject's sway. The man who emerges is a literary genius, constantly getting it wrong, loving others, then hurting them, wrestling with himself and with language, devoted to an almost unfathomable degree to the art of fiction."
--David Remnick, New Yorker

"Superlative. . . . Bailey's account is definitive and genuinely gripping to boot. . . . He leads us lucidly through a dense palimpsest of overlapping drafts, fictional identities, literary feuds, and women."
--Claire Lowdon, Times of London

"Monumental and engrossing . . . Bailey brings new information and a fresh perspective. . . . Is Bailey's compassionate and comprehensive book the biography? No other biographer will have known Roth so well, had such unlimited access to his archives, had a chance to ask him rude questions, even to watch him as he lay dying."
--Elaine Showalter, Times Literary Supplement

"'Magisterial' and 'definitive' . . . don't do justice to Blake Bailey's years-in-the-making opus. . . .
Bailey meticulously conjures the career of one of America's literary titans, the devils and angels that shaped his work."
--O, The Oprah Magazine

About the Author

Blake Bailey is the author of biographies of Philip Roth, John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Prizes. A previous memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. He is working on a biography of James Salter.