Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography

Miles Gone By is a landmark literary event: the autobiography of William F. Buckley Jr., woven from personal pieces composed over the course of a celebrated writing life of more than fifty years.

Here is Buckley the boy, growing up in a family of ten rambunctious children, with a saintly mother and spirited father; Buckley the daring young political controversialist and enfant terrible whose debut book, God and Man at Yale, was a shocking New York Times bestseller; Buckley the editor of National Review, widely hailed as the founder of the modern conservative movement; Buckley the politician and mischievous humorist; Buckley the proud father and devoted husband; Buckley the spy and novelist of spies; and Buckley the yachtsman and bon vivant.

Along the way, you’ll be treated to Buckley’s romance with wine, his love of the right word, his intoxication with music, and his joy in skiing and travel.

You’ll also meet Buckley’s friends: Ronald Reagan, “zestfully concerned for the company of others”; Henry Kissinger “amusing, curious, ever-so-lightly irreverent”; Clare Boothe Luce, “a renowned beauty and man of affairs (a feminist, she stoutly resisted the stylistic effronteries of she-speech)”; Tom Wolfe, with “a trace of a Virginia accent, and of course there is the renowned diffidence, the matador taking tea with his mother”; John Kenneth Galbraith, who “consistently writes pleasant tributes to my own books, inevitably advising the reader that my political opinions should be ignored, my fiction or accounts of life at sea appreciated”; David Niven, of whom “my wife suspected that his magic was to induce a whim, so that he could gratify it”; and many others.

This unforgettable work paints a wonderful and indelible picture of an extraordinary man and his extraordinary life.