Floyd Skloot

His memoir, In the Shadow of Memory, gained high praise in a review by Julia Keller, who said "the glory of Skloot's prose is that, even when it is lush and seemingly digressive, it is ruggedly specific."

"[2] The next memoir, A World of Light, was reviewed by Mark Essig, who noted that the series of essays covered Skloot's present life, visiting his mother who is altered by Altzheimer's Disease, and recollecting his own childhood events, demonstrates that "Skloot knows something of grace, but he has left failure far behind.

"[3] A subsequent memoir, Revertigo: An Off-Kilter Memoir, comprising 14 essays previously published in literary journals, evoked praise from Suzanne Koven, who says that "His essays weave smoothly through pivotal episodes in his life as a son, father, reader, writer, husband, and patient.

"[5] Another reviewer, Claire Dederer, praises the last portion of the book which focuses directly on the physical experience of vertigo, saying it is "an elegant meditation on balance, aging, helplessness, dependency and, especially, love."

It is a literary romp through Dorsetshire and Hardy's tangled love life with a gateway between real and imagined lives.

Jeanne Marie Laskas says that "Only the inventive Floyd Skloot could come up with—and gorgeously pull off—an experiment like The Phantom of Thomas Hardy.

With the intensity of a fevered dream, he seeks his own self-integration after brain trauma while digging around, assembling, and imagining the history of the elusive Hardy.

Skloot dazzles with the depth of his research, and enchants with his signature vivid, precise, and thoroughly delicious prose.

[8] Kirkus Reviews was not as impressed, saying "A sporadically insightful, intermittently entertaining blend of memoir, literary history, and fabulist speculation.

[12] In 2004,[citation needed] he was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in residence at their Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.

[citation needed] In May 2006 he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from his alma mater, Franklin & Marshall College.

[citation needed] In January 2010, Skloot was listed by Poets & Writers as "one of fifty of the most inspiring authors in the world;" he was described by this sentence: "Despite virus-induced brain damage, he writes with surprising tenderness and candor about recreating a life for himself and, in the process, makes us think about our own.