Emily Cheney Neville: A Brief Biography

Emily Cheney Neville was born on December 28, 1919, in Manchester, Connecticut. Her parents were Howell, and Anne Bunce Cheney. Emily was the youngest of her siblings, and she’d come from an extremely close-knit family. In her youth, Emily had been surrounded by her siblings, and cousins. A great deal of her extended family worked at silk mills, and so the many Cheney children attended the ‘Cheney Family School’. Emily didn’t attend public school, until the seventh grade.

Emily Cheney Neville attended Oxford School, in Hartford. And in 1940, she graduated from Bryn Mawr College, with an economics degree. After graduating college, Emily started working at various newspapers — such as the New York Daily News, where she worked as an office girl. She also worked at the New York Daily Mirror, where she wrote a profile column.

In 1948, Emily married newspaperman Glenn Neville, who worked for the Hearst Corporation. They lived in New York City, and the couple had five children together. While she was raising her young children, Emily took a temporary break from writing. She waited until they were all in school, before she started writing again.

When Emily was first starting to get into writing again, she tried initially with picture books. But she didn’t have a lot of success. And so, she wrote a short story about a boy and a cat…