Hunt, Tom 1960-
(Tom A. Hunt)

PERSONAL:

Born 1960.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Litchfield, CT.Office—Kent School, P.O. Box 2006, Kent, CT 06757.Agent— Wendy Sherman Associates, 450 7th Ave., Ste. 2307,New York, NY 10123.

CAREER:

Kent School, Kent, CT, English teacher.

WRITINGS:

Cliffs of Despair: A Journey to Suicide's Edge(nonfiction), Random House (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to The Best American Essays anthology.

SIDELIGHTS:

Tom Hunt uses writing as a way to attempt to understand the mind set behind his brother-in-law's suicide. He chose to visit a place that, despite its beauty, is famed for the number of suicides that occur there each year—more than five hundred since 1965. Beachy Head, on the coast of England, boasts a stretch of high, treacherous cliffs that hold the dubious honor of being the third-most-frequently used location for people attempting to kill themselves after San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and the Aokigahara forest in Japan. Hunt visited Beachy Head and spoke to dozens of local residents, interviewing them regarding the suicide attempts and the ways in which they deal with them. In his travels, he met individuals who have tried to convince people not to jump, those who volunteer to help in the retrieval of bodies, and even one person who survived a suicide attempt. With his research, Hunt strives to determine whether all suicides are the result of irrational thinking, or whether certain circumstances alter the intent behind the act. The initial essay that resulted from Hunt's investigation was included in The Best American Essays collection. Hunt then expanded his findings into a book:Cliffs of Despair: A Journey to Suicide's Edge. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly remarked that "what distinguishes this debut is both the accomplished prose and the author's refusal to judge."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Library Journal, January 1, 2006, Susan Pease, review ofCliffs of Despair: A Journey to Suicide's Edge, p. 139.

People, February 20, 2006, Allison Lynn and Josh Emmons, "Books," review of Cliffs of Despair, p. 49.

Publishers Weekly, November 29, 2005, review ofCliffs of Despair, p. 40.