撰寫美國著名作家約翰‧契佛（John Cheever）一生傳記的《Cheever》甫獲2009年度「美國全國書評界獎」（National Book Critic Circle Award）的傳記類獎！

As conventions change and language shifts after an author's death, his or her fiction tends to read differently. When this happens, speculation often arises through a new lens about what the true impetus for the work might have been. For the theories that emerge, even in our post-poststructuralist era, we are greatly beholden to Freud. Readers pick over texts and correspondence looking for clues and quotes to bolster pet theories -- Fyodor Dostoevsky was bipolar, Emily Dickinson a closet case, Edgar Allan Poe a pedophile -- that end up bound and sold as biographies. Although sometimes fascinating, these books generally rely on such scant evidence, stitched together with conjecture, that the very idea of an author's novels providing any meaningful insight into his or her state of mind has become, in some quarters, a laughable cliché. Yet many writers do weave their own obsessions into fiction, and some also want to reveal the truth about the interplay between their life and work. In the end John Cheever, the subject of Blake Bailey's magnificent biography, was one of these.