

E. E. Cummings
A Life
Author: Susan Cheever
Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki
Unabridged: 7 hr 53 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 02/11/2014
Author: Susan Cheever
Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki
Unabridged: 7 hr 53 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 02/11/2014
Susan Cheever was born in New York City and graduated from Brown University. A Guggenheim Fellow and a director of the board of the Yaddo Corporation, she currently teaches in the MFA programs at Bennington College and the New School. She lives in New York City.
Stefan Rudnicki is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and an award-winning narrator who has won several Audie Awards, as well as more than twenty-five Earphones Awards, and been named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices.
A short but solid biography of the versatile modernist.......more
A fair enough biography, but with some qualms: 1) possibly because Cheever herself is the daughter of a famous writer, she seems a bit more hung up on Cummings's daughter than seems strictly necessary 2) she makes a couple of waves at addressing Cummings's alleged anti-Semitism, but never really grap......more
anyone lived in a pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down) spring summer autumn winter he sang his didn't he danced his did Women and men(both little and small) cared for anyone not at all they sowed their isn't they reaped their same sun moon stars rain. . . . And that beauty is only part of o......more
True to it's title, E. E. Cummings: A Life shows the life of America's first modernist in all its banality. Readers gravitate toward biography partly for this precise reason: it reassures us that our lives are not so different than those of our favorite personalities by demonstrating how their lives......more
When we begin this biography of E. E. Cummings we're aware that Susan Cheever knew him through her father, John. The opening is fascinating as she tells of the night in 1958 she met him following a poetry reading. She sat in the back seat and studied him while her father drove Cummings from the read......more
“Cheever’s reconsideration of Cummings and his work charms, rattles, and enlightens in emulation of Cummings’ radically disarming, tender, sexy, plangent, and furious poems.” Booklist (starred review)
“Even those with no interest in modern poetry may want to listen to the story of Cummings’ life; it has all the elements of drama, and then some. Those who are familiar with the poetry or the two prose books…will find it irresistible. Stefan Rudnicki’s measured narration resists sensationalism and, when the notoriously difficult poems are quoted, manages to convey something of their sense and formal structure. He reflects the intimate tone of this biography…without losing the author’s analytical distance.” AudioFile
“Drawing on letters, archival material, and several more comprehensive biographies, Cheever distills the major events of Cummings’ life along with reflections on the challenge of interpreting her subject’s self-destructive behavior, anti-Semitism, sexuality, and egotism…This sympathetic life may win Cummings a new generation of readers.” Kirkus Reviews