Frederick Exley

Frederick Earl "Fred" Exley (March 28, 1929 – June 17, 1992) was an American writer. His fictional memoir A Fan's Notes received critical acclaim and awards. He followed it up with two more fictional memoirs.

Early life and education Exley was born (Frederic) March 28, 1929, in Watertown, New York. He was the third of four children, including a twin sister, Frances, born to Earl and Charlotte. 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. Exley had a brief stint at Katonah High School in Katonah, New York, where he was named to the conference all-star basketball team.

Exley entered Hobart College in the pre-dental program in 1949. The next 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.

Early career 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.

Itinerant life and instability Exley was institutionalized three times in the 1950s after entering an itinerant period marked by acute alcoholism, obsession with New York Giants football, mental instability and schizophrenia 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 Harlem Valley State Hospital, the model for the Avalon Valley facility mentioned in A Fan's Notes. It was there that 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 Exley, was born.

Divorce and A Fan's Notes

In 1962, Fritz obtained a divorce from Exley at her father's request.

In 1965, Exley, then 36, met the 20-year-old Nancy Glenn while on vacation in Palm Beach Shores, Florida. She was 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 Posts copy desk; they married on September 13, 1967, and Glenn gave birth to Exley's second daughter, Alexandra Exley, on January 12, 1968. Exley and Glenn divorced on January 8, 1971.

A Fan's Notes was published in September 1968, and although early sales were not good, its release prompted widespread critical acclaim. The novel, about a longtime failure who makes good by finally writing a memoir about his pained life, was a finalist for the National Book Award, The book primarily concerns Exley's life in Florida; an afternoon with Steinem; a semester spent teaching at the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa; and an homage to the life and career of literary critic and author Edmund Wilson, who lived near Watertown at Talcottville in upstate New York.

Last Notes From Home Exley traveled to the Hawaiian island of Lanai, where he began work on the final novel of his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Last Notes From Home. In May 1977, Rolling Stone publisher and co-founder Jann Wenner paid Exley $20,000 to publish up to six excerpts of the work-in-progress. The magazine published three excerpts, in June 1977, October 1978 and February 1979. The following year, Exley's papers were acquired by collector Robert C. Stevens and donated to the University of Rochester. In 1984, Exley's major debt was temporarily relieved when he received a Guggenheim Foundation grant of $21,000. Frank Gifford, who was portrayed as a hero and object of Exley's envy in A Fan's Notes, invited Exley to attend Super Bowl XXI in Pasadena, California, where the New York Giants defeated the Denver Broncos.

Soon after, Exley began work on a spy thriller to be titled Mean Greenwich Time, but he did not come close to completing it.

Final years and death Exley moved in with his aunt Frances Knapp in Alexandria Bay, and became very ill while traveling to London for a journalism assignment. After falling into poor health in late 1990 and being hospitalized with congestive heart failure, Exley cared for his ailing aunt who eventually died in 1991. The following year Exley suffered two strokes and died at Edward John Noble Hospital in Alexandria Bay on June 17, 1992.

Film adaptation

A 1972 film adaptation of A Fan's Notes, directed by Eric Till and starring Jerry Orbach, was screened at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival and released in Canada, but never put into general release in the US. Exley stated that the film "bore no relationship to anything I'd written."

In 2010, author Brock Clarke released a novel entitled Exley. In the novel, the main character, Miller, is obsessed with Exley. Entertainment Weekly gave the novel a B+ and stated: "Frederick Exley's classic 1968 account of his epic alcoholism, A Fan's Notes, bears the oxymoronic subtitle 'A Fictional Memoir.' It is the space between those words, between real and fabricated memory, that Clarke examines. . . With humor as black as Exley's liver, Clarke picks apart the fictions we tell one another — and those we tell ourselves."

Also in 2010, and in part in recognition of Clarke's novel, Alex Kudera began a series of interviews with novelists on the topic of Exley and his influence on their work. His first interview was with Eleanor Henderson, whose Ten Thousand Saints went on to be named one of the 10 Best Books of 2011 by The New York Times. He has also interviewed The Funny Man author John Warner, among others. Exley himself admired few of his contemporaries. Mel Zerman, the late Harper & Row executive, recalled: "He had very little to say about most writers that was good. He liked William Styron but maybe that was because they shared an agent."

In 2012, Matthew Ricke and Brandon Chamberlin opened a bar called "the Exley" in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, named after the author of their favorite book, A Fan's Notes.