Books: The Man, but Not His Voice JOHN CHEEVER: A BIOGRAPHY

Buried within the lengthy list of acknowledgments at the end of this life of John Cheever is a poignant sentence indeed: "The most important book dealing with Cheever's life is Susan Cheever's Home Before Dark, a sensitive memoir that provides fascinating quotations from his journals and letters." Scott Donaldson, a professor of English at the College of William and Mary, does not go on to explain why his book hardly quotes journals and letters at all, but the reason is obvious. Susan's book about her father was published in 1984, several years before an important glitch arose in the writing of...

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