Bestselling author Susan Cheever chronicles our national love affair with liquor, taking a long, thoughtful look at the way alcohol has changed our nation's history. This is the often-overlooked story of how alcohol has shaped American events and the American character from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
Biography
"She's put together a smart and readable portrait of this artist as a seemingly perpetual young man whose adult years were filled with personal despair, jumbled politics, a mix of anti-Communism, polite anti-Semitism and American self-actualization as well as family heartbreak." --Alan Cheuse on NPR
"As a biography of one of the most humane and beneficial Americans who ever lived, it is a national treasure."
--Kurt Vonnegut
Literary History
Transcendentalism--the story behind the scenes.
Addiction
"A short, steamy read."
--New York Post
Novels
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989
Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Paperback: Random House, 1983.
Simon & Schuster, 1981. Paperback: Ballantine Group: 1982.
Simon & Schuster, 1980. Paperback: Fawcett, 1982.
Memoir
Raising wonderful children in a difficult world
A poignant memoir of a man driven by boundless genius and ambition.
"Engrossing and remarkably devoid of self-flagellation."
--Seattle Weekly
"Ms. Cheever's. . . coolly intelligent perspective. . . provides a clear, hard-edged picture of the snobbery, sexism, anti-Semitism adultery, alcoholism, and emotional dishonesty that were part and parcel of those swimming pools and tennis courts."
--Wall Street Journal