Home Before Dark

customer reviews

In Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever, daughter of the famously talented writer John Cheever, uses previously unpublished letters, journals, and her own precious memories to create a candid and insightful tribute to her father. While producing some of the most beloved and celebrated American literature of this century, John Cheever wrestled with personal demons that deeply affected his family life as well as his career. In this poignant memoir of a man driven by boundless genius and ambition, Susan Cheever writes with heartwrenching honesty of family life with the father, the writer, and the remarkable man she loved.

Choose a format:
Trade Paperback

Choose a format:

Buy from us:

Washington Square Press |
256 pages |
ISBN 9780671028503 |
January 1999

Add to Cart

$19.95 List Price

Usually ships within 1 business day

Buy from another retailer:

see more

Praise

“

”

“Newsweek A fine, very brave book...one of the best portraits of an American writer. ”

“The New York Times Book Review Intimate, deeply felt, and often harrowing. ”

“John Updike Whatever biographers and literary historians of the future make of John Cheever, their ur-text, their indespensible place of beginning will have to be Susan Cheever's beautiful book about her father. ”

“The Washington Post Book World One of the most moving and intimate books I have read in years. ”

“The Wall Street Journal A restrained and haunting elegy. ”

“The New York Times Book Review Home Before Dark clearly demanded more from its author, more courage and force of heart than will be required of any biographer of John Cheever. ”

“Los Angeles Herald Examiner Out of the pain of real life Susan Cheever has created a document that is ultimately a paean to family love, as humane and bittersweet as the best of her father's work, and as completely... ”

“Joyce Carol Oates A powerful book”

– beautifully written....I don't know when I have read anything that absorbed me more.

“Chicago Tribune Book World An act of love, a compassionate, well-written account not just of the father, or the writer, but of the whole man”

– his exhilerations and his darker impulses.

‹ ›

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

My father was always a storyteller. His home room teacher at Thayer Academy used to promise her class that John would tell a story if they behaved. With luck, and increasing skill, he could spin the story out over two or three class periods so that the teacher and his classmates forgot all about arithmetic and geography and social studies. He told them stories about ship captains and eccentric old ladies and orphan boys, gallant men and dazzling women in a world where the potent forces of evil and darkness were confounded and good triumphed in the end. He peopled his tales with his own family and friends and neighbors from the...