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John
Cheever (May 27, 1912–June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer,
sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His The Stories of John
Cheever won the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction in
1979.
[edit]
Life
Cheever was born in
Quincy, Massachusetts.
His father owned a shoe factory and was relatively
wealthy until he lost his business in the Wall
Street Crash of 1929 and deserted his family.
During this time in his life, the young John
Cheever was often comforted by his older brother
Fred. It is said that many of his later works are
dedicated to this integral influence in his life.
The young Cheever was deeply upset by the
breakdown of his parents' relationship. His formal
education ended when he was seventeen and left
home. Cheever studied at that time at Thayer Academy, but
was expelled for smoking. The experience was the
nucleus of his first published story, 'Expelled'
(1930), which Malcolm Cowley bought for The New
Republic. Cheever went to live with his brother in
Boston. He wrote
synopses for MGM and sold stories to various
magazines. After a journey in Europe, Cheever
returned to the U.S. He
settled in New York City and
became friends with such writers as John Dos
Passos, E. E. Cummings, James Agee, and James
Farrell. In 1933 he attended the Yaddo writers'
colony in Saratoga
Springs.
Cheever died in 1982, at
the age of 70, in Ossining, New York. He
wrestled with alcoholism all of his adult life. In
1987, his widow, Mary, signed a contract with a
small publisher, Academy Chicago, for the right to
publish Cheever's uncollected short stories. The
contract led to a long legal battle, and a book of
13 stories by the author, published in 1994. Two
of Cheever's children, Susan Cheever and Benjamin
Cheever, became novelists. Susan Cheever's memoir,
Home before Dark, revealed Cheever's bisexuality,
which was confirmed by his posthumously published
letters and journals . Cheever claimed in his
diaries to have been diagnosed with Narcissistic
Personality Disorder (NPD) by a marriage counselor
that his wife forced him to
see.
[edit]
Career
His most significant works
include the Wapshot books (The Wapshot Chronicle
won the National Book Award in 1958), and the
collection The Stories of John Cheever (which won
the Pulitzer Prize). He was a frequent contributor
to The New Yorker, and was considered one of the
purest examples of "the New Yorker writer."
Cheever's main theme was the spiritual and
emotional emptiness of life. He especially
described the manners and morals of middle-class,
suburban America,
with an ironic humor which softened his basically
dark vision. A number of Cheever's early works
were published in The New Republic, Collier's
Weekly, and The Atlantic. In 1935 he began a
lifelong association with The New Yorker. He
married Mary Winternitz in 1941, and two years
later, published his first book, The Way Some
People Live. Its stories had originally appeared
in magazines and depicted the life of Upper East Side and suburban
residents or dealt with Cheever's own experiences
as a recruit. He had served during World War II as
an infantry gunner and member of the Signal
Corps.
After the war he worked as
a teacher and wrote scripts for television. In
1951, Cheever received a Guggenheim Fellowship,
which allowed him to become a full-time writer.
His second collection, The Enormous Radio And
Other Stories, was published in 1953. In the
mid-1950s Cheever began writing novels. The
Wapshot Chronicle (1957) was an autobiographical
story based on his mother's and father's
relationship, his family's genteel decline, and
his own life. The book won the National Book Award
in 1958. In the 1960s Cheever worked briefly as a
Hollywood
scripwriter on a film version of D.H. Lawrence's
The Lost Girl, published in 1920. From 1956 to
1957, Cheever taught writing at Barnard College - a
job he never liked much. However, he was teacher
at the University of
Iowa and
at Sing Sing prison in the early 1970s, and
Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at
Boston University
(1974-75). The Stories Of John Cheever (1978) won
the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book
Critics Circle Award, and an American Book
Award.
[edit]
Trivia
Cheever's bisexuality was
referenced in an episode of the television sitcom
Seinfeld, "The Cheever Letters", in which
correspondence from Cheever is discovered,
revealing Cheever had an affair with the fictional
character of Susan Ross' father. However, the
character George Costanza incorrectly names the
title of Cheever's short prison novel Falconer
(the name of the prison) as The
Falconer.
[edit]
Bibliography
The Way Some People Live: A
Book of Short Stories (1943)
The Enormous Radio and
Other Stories (1953)
The Day the Pig Fell Into
the Well (1954)
Stories (1956)
The Wapshot Chronicle
(1957)
The Housebreaker at Shady
Hill and Other Stories (1958)
Some People, Places and
Things That Will Not Appear In My Next Novel
(1961)
The Wapshot Scandal (1964)
The Brigadier and the Golf
Widow (1964) - includes 'The Swimmer'
Homage to Shakespeare
(1965)
Bullet
Park
(1969)
The World of Apples (1973)
Falconer (1977)
The Stories of John Cheever
(1978)
The Leaves, the Lionfish
and the Bear (1980)
Oh, What a Paradise It Seems (1982)
The Journals of John
Cheever (1991)
[edit] External
links
Biography
Benjamin Cheever talks
about his father, John Cheever, in this 1992 audio
interview, RealAudio
Susan Cheever talks about
her father, John Cheever, in these audio
interviews (1984, 1985, 1991), RealAudio
John Cheever: Parody and
The Suburban Aesthetic by John Dyer
Review of The Stories Of
John Cheever
The Paris Review interview
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