Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley

In Misfit, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic of The Washington Post portrays in full one of the most tormented, distinctive, and talented writers of the post-war years. Frederick Exley's story, which in Yardley's telling reads as if it were a novel, reveals a singular personality: raunchy, vulgar, self-centered, and even infantile, yet also loyal, self-deprecating, and unfailingly humorous. Sympathetic and affectionate, honest and unsparing, Yardley's portrait gives us a man who sacrificed everything in order to write and who became, even more than before, his own most memorable creation.