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.

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.

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.

Exley avoided being drafted in 1951 when he failed his Selective Service examination on account of injuries sustained in the car accident.

In 1952, Exley dropped out of USC and moved to New York City to find employment, only to return a year later to complete a BA in English.

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.

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.

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 (the model for "the Counselor" in A Fan's Notes), asked Exley to forge a signature on a check for one of his clients, an action that led to Phillips' disbarment.

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

Several years of intermittent teaching jobs in Clayton, Gouverneur, and Indian River, New York followed.

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, after it was rejected by at least a dozen publishers, she finally sold it to David Segal at Harper & Row.

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 Post's copy desk; they married on September 13, 1967, and Glenn gave birth to Exley's second daughter, Alexandra Exley, on January 12, 1968.

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, and received the William Faulkner Award for best first novel, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award.

In 1969, Exley moved into an apartment on 19th Street in Manhattan, spending much of his time at the Lion's Head bar at 59 Christopher Street.

In 1970, Exley's mother purchased a small house in Alexandria Bay, New York and he temporarily moved in, though he still spent time in Florida working on Pages From a Cold Island.

Charlotte's home was to become Exley's home base for the next 20 years.

In the fall of that year he interviewed Gloria Steinem in Key Biscayne Florida.

Exley and Glenn divorced on January 8, 1971.

The resulting essay, entitled "Saint Gloria & the Troll", was published in Playboy in July 1974.