Frederick Exley

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Frederick Exley

Born March 28, 1929
Watertown, New York
Died June 17, 1992
Occupation novelist
Nationality American
Writing period 1968-1992

Frederick Exley, (March 28, 1929, – June 17, 1992) was an American novelist best known as the author of A Fan's Notes.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Frederick Exley was born March 28, 1929 in Watertown, New York. His father, who died in 1945 when Exley was 16, was a celebrated former athlete and local basketball coach whose legacy would be a dominating influence on Exley's early life. A car accident the following year injured Exley and prevented him from graduating high school on schedule. After being awarded $14,000 in a settlement after the accident, Exley began working in nearby railroad yards. After a brief post-graduate stint at John Jay High School in Katonah, New York, where he was named to the conference all-star basketball team, Exley entered Hobart College in 1949. After a year he transferred to the University of Southern California, where he began to follow the career of fellow student and future football legend Frank Gifford. Exley avoided being drafted in 1951 when he failed his Selective Service examination on account of injuries sustained in the car accident.

The following year Exley dropped out of USC and moved to New York to find employment, only to return a year later to finish an A.B. degree in English. Subsequently he returned to New York to work in public relations for New York Central Railroad. After a year there he relocated to their Chicago office, then began working for Rock Island Railroad in the same capacity. Exley soon took over as managing editor of the railroad's employee magazine, The Rocket, where his first published writing appeared.

After losing his job in 1956, Exley entered an itinerant period of his life marred by acute alcoholism, obsession with sports, and mental instability that was to provide much of the autobiographical material for his first book, A Fan's Notes. In 1958, Exley was admitted briefly to Stony Lodge, a private mental institution in Westchester County, New York where he met Francena Fritz, whom he began courting. Soon after he was admitted to the state institution, Harlem Valley State Hospital, the model for the "Avalon Valley", facility mentioned in A Fan's Notes. It was here Exley began writing in earnest. In 1959, he was released from Harlem Valley and married Fritz on October 31. They moved to Greenwich, Connecticut and Exley was offered a teaching position at a school in Port Chester, New York. In 1960 his first daughter, Pamela Rae Exley, was born. In 1961 Exley received a provisional appointment as clerk and crier of the courts in Jefferson County, New York, where a lawyer friend, Gordon Phillips, asked Exley to forge a signature on a check for one of his clients, an action that led to Phillips' disbarment.

The following year, Francena Fritz obtained a divorce from Exley at her father's request. Several years followed of intermittent teaching jobs in Clayton, Gouverneur, and Indian River, New York. His alcoholism growing worse, Exley began a decade of briefly-held jobs and institutionalization, and spent time vacationing on Singer Island in Riviera Beach, Florida while continuing to work on A Fan's Notes. In 1964, Exley sent the completed manuscript for A Fan's Notes to Houghton Mifflin (who rejected it), and to Joe Fox at Random House, who suggested an agent, Lynn Nesbit. Nesbit shopped the manuscript around, and eventually sold it to David Segal at Harper & Row which earned Exley $3000.

In 1965 Exley met Nancy Glenn while on vacation in Palm Beach Shores, Florida and working as a bookkeeper for The Buccaneer, her husband's resort. The following year, Glenn separated from her husband and moved in with Exley, beginning a long relationship that saw many temporary separations and reconciliations. She became pregnant while Exley was employed at the Palm Beach Post's copy desk, they married in 1967, and Glenn gave birth to Exley's second daughter, Alexandra Exley, early the following year. Later in the year, Glenn became pregnant with another child, and Exley began working on his second novel Pages From A Cold Island. The child, Robert Brandon Exley, was born with severe birth defects in April 1968. A Fan's Notes was published in the fall and, though it didn't sell well, its release prompted widespread critical acclaim and the novel was nominated for the National Book Award. It also received the William Faulkner Award for best first novel, the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and earned Exley a Rockefeller Foundation grant worth $10,000. In 1969 Exley and Glenn began divorce proceedings.

In 1970, Exley's mother purchased a small house in Alexandria Bay, New York and Fred temporarily moved in, though he still spent time in Florida working on Pages from a Cold Island. Charlotte's home became Exley's home base for the next 20 years. His divorce from Glenn was finalized in 1971, the same year that his son died. In the fall he traveled to Rome to interview Gloria Steinem. The resultant essay, "Saint Gloria & the Troll," published in Playboy a few years later, earned Exley their Editorial Award for the year's best nonfiction piece. In 1972 Exley was a guest lecturer at the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa and a film adaptation of A Fan's Notes starring Jerry Orbach was released in Canada. In 1973, Exley's brother, a Vietnam veteran, died in Hawaii after a battle with cancer. In 1975, Exley's second novel, Pages from a Cold Island was published by Random House to considerably less acclaim than his debut and Exley traveled to Hawaii, where he began work on the final novel of his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Last Notes From Home.

Rolling Stone paid Exley $20,000 for up to six excerpts of Last Notes from Home in May, 1977. The following year Exley's papers were acquired by collector Robert C. Stevens and donated to the University of Rochester. In 1984, Exley received a Guggenheim Foundation grant of $21,000. Last Notes From Home was published by Random House in September 1988, with Frank Gifford himself hosting a publication party for Exley in New York. Soon after, Exley began to work on a spy novel to be titled Mean Greenwich Time, but subsequently abandoned it. He moved in with his aunt Frances Knapp in Alexandria Bay and became very ill while traveling to London for a journalism assignment. After being diagnosed with congestive heart failure, Exley cared for his ailing aunt who eventually died in 1991. The following year Exley suffered a stroke while alone in his apartment and died in the hospital the next day, June 10, 1992. His ashes were interred at Brookside Cemetery in Watertown, New York, next to his parents.

A biography of Exley, Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley, by prominent literary critic, Pulitzer Prize winner, and early champion and friend of Exley's Jonathan Yardley, appeared in 1997. Yardley's central thesis is that Exley was a brilliant one-book writer. Additionally, when A Fan's Notes was published by The Modern Library, Yardley wrote the preface.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels

[edit] Articles

  • "He's a Pro." "SPORT magazine", July 1969 (excerpt from A Fan's Notes).
  • "Poem from a Man at Middle Age." Esquire, May 1973.
  • "Good-bye, Edmund Wilson." The Atlantic Monthly, March 1974 (excerpt from Pages from a Cold Island).
  • "Saint Gloria & the Troll." Playboy, July 1974 (excerpt from Pages from a Cold Island).
  • "To Oahu with the 'Wild Geese'." Rolling Stone, 30 June 1977 (excerpt from Last Notes from Home).
  • Letter to the editor about William Styron in Esquire, 11 April 1978.
  • "James Seamus Finbarr O'Twoomey." Rolling Stone, 5 October 1978 (excerpt from Last Notes from Home).
  • "Ms. Robin Glenn." Rolling Stone, 22 February 1979 (excerpt from Last Notes from Home).
  • "A Fan's Notes Goes to Super Bowl XIII." Inside Sports, October 1979.
  • Review of Bill Barich's Laughing in the Hills, for New York Magazine, 11 August 1980.
  • Review of Clive James's Unreliable Memoirs, for New York Magazine, 13 April 1981.
  • "Holding Penalties Build Men." Inside Sports, November 1981.
  • "A Case for Backing Cincinnati--and for Ice Fishing." New York Times, 24 January 1982.
  • "Just Who Is 'the Game' in Professional Football?" New York Times, 22 August 1982.
  • "Football '83: Side Lines." Rolling Stone, 15 September 1983.
  • "The Natural." GQ, February 1984.
  • "The Laureate of Alexandria Bay." Esquire, March 1986.
  • "Brother in Arms." Rolling Stone, 17 and 31 July 1986 (excerpt from Last Notes from Home).
  • "A Fan's Note." American Film, September 1986.
  • "The Giants Will Fail and Here's Why." New York Times, 30 November 1986.
  • "A Fan's Further Notes." Esquire, June 1987.
  • Article (title unknown, about Alexandria Bay fishermen) for Adirondack Life, ca.1989.
  • "Women and Football." The Cable Guide, November 1989.
  • "If Nixon Could Possess the Soul of this Woman, Why the Hell Can't I?" Esquire, December 1989.
  • "Tell'em Frankie's here." The Sunday Correspondent, London, 1 July 1990.
  • Article (title unknown, about The Lion's Head saloon) for GQ, December 1990.
  • "Exley's Last Notes." Esquire, August 1993 (posthumous extract from unfinished spy novel).

[edit] External links