Life
He is the son of a Russian immigrant father and a mother of Romanian descent. He graduated from Perth Amboy High School in 1957 and Rutgers University in 1961. After traveling abroad and working for several years at various writing and editing jobs, he returned to Rutgers to study for a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, which he was awarded in 1974 (having written a thesis on the life and work of the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier). He then taught literature at Bennington College for nearly a decade and then took various posts at Sewanee: The University of the South, the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at George Mason University.
It was in the late 1970s that he began publishing short fiction, beginning with a story in The New Yorker and going on to write for magazines such as Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, and New Letters. He brought out his first novel, a biographical historical work about John Reed and Louise Bryant, in 1982, and a number of other works of fiction and nonfiction followed.
He is a regular book reviewer for the NPR radio program All Things Considered.
Read more about this topic: Alan Cheuse
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else—we are the busiest people in the world.”
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“Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way as gives us breath:
Such a Truth as ends all strife:
Such a Life as killeth death.”
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“His life was a sort of dream, as are most lives with the mainspring left out.”
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