Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter.

CHEEVER, Susan.

$125.00

Item Number: 142633

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984.

First edition of Cheever’s candid portrait of her father, John Cheever. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “New York City October 1984 To Burrows with love from his old friend Susan.” The recipient, American litigator Kenneth David Burrows married American novelist Erica Jong in 1989. Jong remains best known for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying which became famously controversial for its portrayal of female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. Written in the first person and narrated by its protagonist, 29-year-old American poet Isadora Wing, Fear of Flying was written in the throes of the Sexual Revolution of the 1970s and encapsulated the movement’s redefinition of female sexuality. In interviews, Jong stated: “At the time I wrote Fear of Flying, there was not a book that said women are romantic, women are intellectual, women are sexual—and brought all those things together… What [Isadora is] looking for is how to be a whole human being, a body and a mind, and that is what women were newly aware they needed in 1973.” The novel remains a feminist classic and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. From the library of Erica Jong and Ken Burrows. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Bernadette Evangelist.

In Home Before Dark, John Cheever's daughter, Susan Cheever, has used his revealing unpublished journals, letters, and her own memories of their life together in a talented and volatile family to tell the remarkable story of one of America's foremost writers. "A stunning portrait of an artist" (Patricia Bosworth).