SUMMARY Alan Cheuse was a novelist, book reviewer, memoirist, and professor of creative writing at George Mason University. A native of New Jersey, he authored several novels, collections of short fiction, a memoir, and personal essays. As a book reviewer, he was a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered since the 1980s. His criticism reflected the strengths of his fiction: a careful attention to voice and character that embodies both the influences of other notable writers and his own distinctive sense of whimsy. He died in 2015 from injuries sustained in a car accident. Cheuse was born on January 23, 1940, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, the son of a Russian immigrant father and a mother of Russian-Romanian descent. He was educated at Perth Amboy High School (1957) and Rutgers University (BA, 1961; PhD in Comparative Literature, 1974), where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the life and work of the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier. Cheuse taught at Bennington College (Vermont), the University of the South (Sewanee, Tennessee), the University of Virginia (Charlottesville), and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). He taught in the creative writing program at George Mason University from 1987 until his death. He lived in Northern Virginia during the school year and spent his summers in Santa Cruz, California, teaching at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.