{"id":3042,"date":"2018-01-29T11:08:26","date_gmt":"2018-01-29T16:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=3042"},"modified":"2018-01-29T11:08:26","modified_gmt":"2018-01-29T16:08:26","slug":"warning-susan-cheevers-alcott-biography-is-a-book-to-avoid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/warning-susan-cheevers-alcott-biography-is-a-book-to-avoid\/","title":{"rendered":"Warning: Susan Cheever’s Alcott Biography Is a Book To Avoid"},"content":{"rendered":"

When a friend told me she was reading Susan Cheever\u2019s book American Bloomsbury<\/em> about Emerson and his circle in Concord, I was intrigued, because I\u2019d read Cheever\u2019s memoir about her father John Cheever years ago and had lost track of her career after that.<\/p>\n

I went to Amazon, but was drawn to Cheever\u2019s Louisa May Alcott biography instead. I didn\u2019t know much about Alcott and I\u2019m a huge fan of biographies (I have several hundred in my library). The book grabbed me based on the sample because it revealed that Alcott didn\u2019t want to write her famous novel Little Women<\/em> \u2014 her editor pushed her to.<\/p>\n

What a great hook.<\/p>\n

When the book arrived, though, I gradually discovered it was awful. I hadn\u2019t bothered reading the thoughtful critiques on Amazon \u2014 I learned its varied faults myself (reviews of Cheever’s American Bloomsbury<\/em> are even more scathing and more numerous).<\/p>\n

Cheever\u2019s assessment of Alcott is marred by trivialities. You learn that Alcott once dropped a pie box in Boston and it tipped \u201cend over end.\u201d Alcott was teased by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. about her height.\u00a0 In Boston, she had hyacinths in a window box. None of these details–and more just as inane–add to an understanding of Alcott\u2019s life or writing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Cheever\u2019s prose can also be gag-worthy: \u201cDeath is a mystery, but life is filled with light and clarity.\u201d\u00a0 Then there are dubious assertions like \u201cgood writing is almost always subversive.\u201d<\/p>\n

She also claims that the Transcendentalists in Concord \u201cessentially created American literature as we know it.\u201d But the first two American authors to be international best sellers, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, got there before Emerson and company, and they had an enormous influence on major authors like Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne. Perhaps to hedge her bets, Cheever loves mentioning Hawthorne as often as possible, but he was peripheral to the Concord crew and mocked them in his novel The Blithedale Romance<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Cheever misrepresents Alcott\u2019s relationship with Henry James and basically gives Alcott credit for more books of his than you can imagine. Without her, we apparently wouldn\u2019t have The Portrait of a Lady,<\/em> Daisy Miller<\/em>, The Bostonians<\/em> or any of his books with a young woman character. They were also good friends, Cheever says, despite every major James biography I\u2019ve read which barely mentions Alcott \u2014 and Cheever doesn\u2019t offer any proof of this supposed relationship.<\/p>\n

Sadly, Publishers Weekly<\/em> gave the book an attention-getting starred review and called it \u201cauthoritative.\u201d Somebody at PW didn\u2019t do homework.<\/p>\n

Why did I keep reading? Morbid curiosity. That\u2019s right: I couldn\u2019t believe how badly written, badly researched, and badly edited a book by a well-known author could be. In the end, it had a kind of freakish charm.<\/p>\n

Lev Raphael books is the author of The Edith Wharton Murders<\/em><\/a> and 24 other books of fiction and non-fiction.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When a friend told me she was reading Susan Cheever\u2019s book American Bloomsbury about Emerson and his circle in Concord, I was intrigued, because I\u2019d read Cheever\u2019s memoir about her father John Cheever years ago and had lost track of her career after that. I went to Amazon, but was drawn to Cheever\u2019s Louisa May … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[877],"tags":[1043,629,628,683,690,686,1036,250,1041,1052,689,685,1040,1039,684,1038,691,675,1037,1042],"class_list":["post-3042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-american-bloomsbury","tag-biographers","tag-biographies","tag-biography","tag-daisy-miller","tag-emerson","tag-hawthorne","tag-henry-james","tag-james-fenimore-cooper","tag-john-cheever","tag-little-women","tag-louisa-may-alcott","tag-melville","tag-poe","tag-susan-cheever","tag-the-blithedale-romance","tag-the-bostonians","tag-the-portrait-of-a-lady","tag-transcendentalists","tag-washington-irving"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3042"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3078,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3042\/revisions\/3078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}