Brainard Cheney is the author of four novels: Devil’s Elbow (1969), This is Adam (1958), River Rogue (1942), and Lightwood (1939), and two plays, I Choose to Die (1960), and Strangers in This World (1951). His writing romanticizes a simple, Southern agrarian lifestyle, much set in the wiregrass country farms of rural Georgia, where he grew up. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1941).
Cheney is associated with the Fugitives, a conservative group of writers based at Vanderbilt University. He worked as a reporter for the Nashville Banner for fifteen years, and regularly contributed reviews and articles to the Sewanee Review. Cheney lived in Washington, DC from 1943 to 1945, working for Senator Tom Stewart (D-TN) and for the U.S. Senate, and again from 1952 to 1958, as a speechwriter and public relations officer for Governor Frank Clement (D-TN).
In 1928, Cheney married Frances Neel Cheney (August 19, 1906 – May 5, 1996), librarian and author of Fundamental Reference Sources (1971), An Annotated List of Selected Japanese Reference Materials (1952), and Cartels, Combines and Trusts: A Selected List of References (1944). Frances Cheney also edited The Poetry Reviews of Allen Tate, 1924 – 1944 (1983). She spent most of her professional career as a librarian and professor of library science at Peabody College, but served as the second secretary of the Poetry Office at the Library of Congress, serving under U.S. Poet Laureate Allen Tate from 1943 to 1944.
The Cheneys shared this house at various times with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, and Katherine Anne Porter.