Blake left college and became the accompanist for Anita O'Day, a jazz singer, and for Lord Buckley, a comedian. He also played for Bud Freeman, Stuff Smith, June Christie and Chris Connor.[1]
In the 1950s Blake, up until that time a petty thief ("the world's most inept burglar"),[1] became a literary sensation when he published his letters in the Paris Review. Blake, who was gay, was a kept man of a Charleston, South Carolina, aristocrat, whose name Blake did not reveal in his letters. In 1971, he published them in The joint: Letters from Prison.[2] A section of The Joint and a short story, The Widow, Bereft, appeared in Esquire Magazine and the short story was selected by Martha Foley and Whit Burnett and included in Best American Short Stories of 1971.[1]
According to Blake, gay men of Charleston were not supporting of each other. "Less Cleverness. More kindness. For the good of the breed, such as it is."
He also corresponded with Alexander Jensen Yow, painter and later paper conservator at the Morgan Library & Museum. He was also a later companion to Lincoln Kirstein and friend of George Platt Lynes. Yow contacted Blake to compliment his Paris Review letters. At first Blake is replying from an island off South Carolina and discussed his writing, jazz piano playing, and love affairs. The last letters are written from Duval County Jail, in Florida, where Blake was awaiting trial for charges of "breaking and entry and grand larceny"; in these letters he includes descriptions of prison life, and a defense of homosexual love.[2] According to William Styron of The New York Times Book Review, for him prison "was far less a purgatory than a retreat, a kind of timeless, walled Yaddo for the gifted misfit."[1]
