Gretchen Cherington grew up as the daughter of the Pulitzer Prize-wining, and U.S. poet laureate, Richard Eberhart. Her home was filled with literary icons from Robert Frost to Anne Sexton to James Dickey. Her first memoir, Poetic License, won first runner-up in memoir for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award and was a 2021 Foreword INDIES finalist in Autobiography and Memoir. Like her grandfather, she chose a long career in business, advising hundreds of CEOs in how to transform their companies into places where both business and people could thrive. She was adjunt faculty in business chool executive programs at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Columbia. Gretchen has served on twenty boards, and has chaired four, including a multibillion dollar B-corporation bank, winning her two leadership awards. Her undergraduate and MBA degrees were earned from the University of New Hampshire. Cherington’s essays have appeared in Yankee, Electric Lit, Hippocampus, and Quartz, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Gretchen and her husband split their time between Portland, Maine, and a saltwater cottage on Penobscot Bay where fading paint is the norm and her gardens have to manage themselves. When not working on her next book, she can be found in her hiking boots, on her bikes or skis, out in the wild.

IN 1922, GEORGE A. HORMEL—founder of the multibillion-dollar company Hormel Foods—demanded the resignation of Gretchen Cherington’s grandfather, Alpha LaRue Eberhart, after a decade-long embezzlement scandal that nearly brought the company to its knees. Was Eberhart, as rumors suggested, complicit?

In scale both intimate and grand, Cherington deftly weaves the histories of Hormel, Eberhart, and embezzler Ransome J. Thomson, the company’s star comptroller, within the sweeping landscape of our country’s early industries, along with keen observations about business leaders gleaned from her thirtyfi ve-year career advising top company executives. The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy chronicles Cherington’s journey from blind faith in family lore to a nuanced consideration of the three men’s great strengths and fl aws— and offers a multilayered, thoughtful exploration of the ways we all must contend with our reverence for heroes, the mythology of powerful men, and the legacy of a complicated past.

At age forty, with two growing children and a new consulting company she’d recently founded, Gretchen Cherington, daughter of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Eberhart, faced a dilemma: Should she protect her parents’ well-crafted family myths while continuing to silence her own voice? Or was it time to challenge those myths and speak her truth―even the unbearable truth that her generous and kind father had sexually violated her?

In this powerful memoir, aided by her father’s extensive archives at Dartmouth College and interviews with some of her father’s best friends, Cherington candidly and courageously retraces her past to make sense of her father and herself. From the women’s movement of the ’60s and the back-to-the-land movement of the ’70s to Cherington’s consulting work through three decades with powerful executives to her eventual decision to speak publicly in the formative months of #MeToo, Poetic License is one woman’s story of speaking truth in a world where, too often, men still call the shots.