Blake Bailey is the author of acclaimed biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson, and he is currently at work on the authorized biography of Philip Roth. He is 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, and a finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Memorial Prizes. His most recent book is a memoir, "The Splendid Things We Planned," published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2014. He lives in Virginia, where he is the Mina Hohenberg Darden Professor of Creative Writing at Old Dominion University.