May 3, 2021

If Good Authors Are Bad People Should They Be Published?

So it turns out that Blake Bailey, the author of the latest Phillip Roth biography, has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault along with predatory behavior when he was a public school teacher. If the accusations are true, that’s bad. The biography had been getting good reviews, but his publisher, W. W. Norton, pulled it and cancelled all future printings based on the accusations.

So here’s the question: Was that the wrong thing to do? (more…)