Susan Cheever
February 14–15, 2011
- Reading: Streaming video, MP3 audio
- Discussion: Streaming video, MP3 audio
Bio
Susan Cheever has published five novels and seven works of nonfiction ranging from memoir to
literary history to psychological investigation. Cheever's writing is at once engrossing and
unsettling, funny and heartbreaking. Home Before Dark, her memoir of her father, the legendary
fiction writer John Cheever, is bravely honest yet shows a narrative restraint that would elude a
less skilled writer. Her most recent book, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction,
explores the boundaries between passion and addiction in a provocative yet tempered, lucid manner.
Cheever's 2006 book American Bloomsbury, a portrait of the community of transcendentalist writers in and around 19th century Concord, was on the Boston Globe's best-seller list for many months and has been lauded as a penetrating look at the lives of some of America's most important writers. Cheever's forthcoming book, Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography, due for publication in November 2010, continues this vivid, humane examination of the woman—a working writer, civic intellectual and headstrong daughter whose communal and familial struggles inform choices many young women face today.
Cheever's work has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and was awarded the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Authors Guild Council, the winner of an Associated Press Award and a director of the Yaddo Corporation. Cheever has taught at Yale, Hunter College, and the New School, and she is on the faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars.
Known for emotional intensity and compassion in her work, Cheever has earned a reputation as one of America's most respected nonfiction writers. Writing about Desire, Kelly McMasters of Newsday has said that Cheever "puts herself under the microscope here because no one else was willing, and she does so with grace."