Misfit: the Strange Life of Frederick Exley - Hardcover

Yardley, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679439498 ISBN 13: 9780679439493

Publisher: Random House USA Inc, 1997

Synopsis

A biography of the tormented and obsessed writer assesses Exley's turbulent personal life, his alcoholism and mental illness, and his literary works--especially his seminal A Fan's Life. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Stunning... Yardley's got old Fred right by the cojones, you should pardon the expression-everything we all cherished about the old bastard, but with all the unmitigated gall too, no holds barred. I devoured it. It's honest, fair, and perceptive as well. Also, there's all sorts of personal stuff in there that, well as I thought I knew the guy, I didn't have an inkling of before. Yardley's right-on when it comes to discussing the books, too, with astute analyses and evaluations of all three, good (but also highly readable) criticism. And Fred exists-to such an extent that I cried at the end. -- David Markson A sympathetic but illusion-free biography...Writing the biography of an autobiographical author as self-exposing as Exley takes guts, and Yardley does a fine job of disentangling the real man from the narrative persona, resisting the temptation to moralize about the man's vices." -- Philip Lopate Esquire Yardley has composed a quiet and profoundly sympathetic book that in its own way is no less enthralling than Exley's racing, exuberant masterpiece...He unobtrusively shows us what is fact and what is fiction in Exley's 'novel.' -- Richard Dyer The Boston Globe An even-handed, quietly persuasive account. It's also a scary case study in the perils of being a writer in America. -- Dan Cryer Newsday Misfit is the sleekest and most compulsively readable literary biography since The Anti-Egotist (1994), Paul Fussel's pointillist life of Kingsley Amis." -- Dwight Garner Salon Yardley is a gifted writer, and he has succeeded in making Exley's life interesting in spite of the fact that so much of it was fruitlessly spent in bars. -- Anthony Storr The Review of Higher Education Luckily for us, [Exley's] biography has been written by Jonathan Yardley, a dignified, decent and unflinching writer. -- Heather Mallick Toronto Sun Yardley's qualities are the opposite of his subject's. He is a steady, sympathetic, attentive biographer. Times Literary Supplement

About the Author:

Jonathan Yardley is the book critic and a columnist for The Washington Post.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0679439498
• ISBN 13: 9780679439493
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 255