Brainard Cheney and The Search for a Hero

Brainard Cheney (1900-1990), Georgia author, published four novels between 1939 and 1969. All of his works drew from the history of the South Georgia rivers and pine forests of the Altamaha River basin. The books also included autobiographical and family history in the stories.

Dr. James Edwin Young’s literary biography presents the thesis that Brainard Cheney spent a lifetime searching history, religion, literature, and philosophy for an identity and ideal to give meaning and purpose to his life.  This was Brainard Cheney’s “Search for a Hero.”  Dr. Young weaves a fascinating story about this quest from the events of Cheney’s life and the fiction he created. In the end, Cheney found answers to his questions through his fiction, his relationships with his literary and political friends, the tenants of his Christian faith, and in his long and productive life.  Ironically, Cheney became the hero of his own Search.

Cheney was born in Fitzgerald, Georgia in 1900 and soon moved to Lumber City, the home area of his father’s family since the early 1800s. His father was an attorney and land speculator who died when Cheney was only eight years old. Growing up fatherless determined and inspired Cheney’s lifelong search for meaning and understanding. He attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville in the 1920s. While at Vanderbilt, he studied under renowned poet John Crowe Ransom and participated in the Fugitive and Agrarian literary movements. He befriended other writers and poets, including Robert Penn Warren, Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Ralph McGill and Flannery O’Connor, among many others.