John Cheever

Born:	May 27, 1912 Quincy, Massachusetts
Died:	June 18, 1982 Ossining, New York
Occupation:	short story writer, novelist
Nationality:	United States
Debut works:	The Way Some People Live
Influences:	Anton Chekhov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway
Influenced:	Michael Chabon

John Cheever (May 27, 1912–June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer, sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, and old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born. Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including "The Enormous Radio," "Goodbye, My Brother," "The Five-Forty-Eight," "The Country Husband," and "The Swimmer"), but also wrote a number of novels, such as The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park, and Falconer. His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both--light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... is the 147th day of the year (148th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1912 (MCMXII) was a leap year starting on Monday in the Gregorian calendar (or a leap year starting on Tuesday in the 13-day-slower Julian calendar). ... Location in Massachusetts Coordinates: , Country United States State Massachusetts County Norfolk County Settled 1625 Incorporated 1792 Government  - Type Mayor-council city  - Mayor William J. Phelan Area  - City  26. ... is the 169th day of the year (170th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday (link displays the 1982 Gregorian calendar). ... For the album by the Kaiser Chiefs see Employment (album) Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. ... This article is in need of attention. ... A novel is an extended work of written, narrative, prose fiction, usually in story form; the writer of a novel is a novelist. ... In English usage, nationality is the legal relationship between a person and a country. ... Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Russian: , IPA: ) was a Russian short story writer and playwright. ... Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American Jazz Age author of novels and short stories. ... Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. ... Michael Chabon (born May 24, 1963) is an American author best known for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. ... is the 147th day of the year (148th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1912 (MCMXII) was a leap year starting on Monday in the Gregorian calendar (or a leap year starting on Tuesday in the 13-day-slower Julian calendar). ... is the 169th day of the year (170th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday (link displays the 1982 Gregorian calendar). ... This article is in need of attention. ... Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Russian: , IPA: ) was a Russian short story writer and playwright. ... Illustration of the backyards of a surburban neighbourhood Suburbs are inhabited districts located either on the outer rim of a city or outside the official limits of a city (the term varies from country to country), or the outer elements of a conurbation. ... The Upper East Side at Sunset The Upper East Side is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, between Central Park and the East River. ... Manhattan is a borough of New York City, New York, USA, coterminous with New York County. ... Westchester County is a primarily suburban county with about 940,000 residents located in the U.S. state of New York. ... This article is about the region in the United States of America. ... The South Shore of Massachusetts is a geographic region stretching south and east from Boston along the shore of Massachusetts Bay toward Cape Cod. ... Location in Massachusetts Coordinates: , Country United States State Massachusetts County Norfolk County Settled 1625 Incorporated 1792 Government  - Type Mayor-council city  - Mayor William J. Phelan Area  - City  26. ... The Five-Forty-Eight is a 1955 short story by John Cheever published in The Stories of John Cheever, though it may have been published previously. ... The Swimmer is a short story by American author John Cheever, published in 1964 in the short story collection The Brigadier and the Golf Widow. ... The Wapshot Chronicle is a 1957 novel by John Cheever about an eccentric family who live a Massachusetts fishing village. ... The National Book Awards is one of the most preeminent literary prizes in the United States. ... The William Dean Howells Medal is awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. ... The Stories of John Cheever is a short story collection by American author John Cheever. ... The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded since 1948 for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. ... The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) is an American association of approximately seven hundred book reviewers. ... American Academy of Arts and Letters is an organization whose goal is to foster, assist, and sustain an interest in American literature, music, and art. ...

Life

Early life and education

John William Cheever was the second child of Frederick Lincoln Cheever and Mary Liley Cheever. His father was a prosperous shoe salesman, and Cheever spent much of his childhood in a large Victorian house in the genteel suburb of Wollaston, MA. In the mid-twenties, however, as the New England shoe and textile industries began their long decline, Frederick Cheever lost most of his money and began to drink heavily. To pay the bills, Mary Cheever opened a gift shop in downtown Quincy — an "abysmal humiliation" for the family, as her son John saw it. In 1926 Cheever began attending Thayer Academy, a private day school, but he found the atmosphere stifling and performed poorly, finally transferring to Quincy High in 1928. A year later he won a short story contest sponsored by the Boston Herald, and was invited back to Thayer as a "special student" on academic probation. His grades continued to be poor, however, and in March 1930 he was either expelled for smoking or (more likely) departed of his own accord when the headmaster delivered an ultimatum to the effect that he must either apply himself or leave. The eighteen-year-old Cheever wrote a sardonic account of this experience, "Expelled," which was subsequently published in The New Republic. Victorian house A Victorian house is a type of house popularized in the Victorian era. ... Thayer Academy (TA) is a private, co-educational, college-preparatory day school located in Braintree, Massachusetts. ... Quincy High School also known as QHS or The Presidents school is located on Coddington Street in Quincy, Massachusetts. ... The Boston Herald is a tabloid newspaper (not to be confused with tabloid press periodicals), the smaller of the two big dailies in Boston, Massachusetts, with a daily circulation of 230,543 in September 2005. ... For other uses, see the New Republic disambiguation page. ...

Around this time, Cheever's older brother Fred — recalled from Dartmouth in 1926 because of the family's financial crisis — reentered his life "when the situation was most painful and critical," as John later wrote. After the bankruptcy (in 1932) of Kreuger and Toll International Match, in which Frederick Cheever had invested what was left of his money, the Cheever house on Winthrop Avenue was lost to foreclosure. The parents separated, while John and Fred took an apartment together on Beacon Hill in Boston. In 1933, John wrote to Elizabeth Ames, the director of the Yaddo artist's colony in Saratoga Springs, New York: "The idea of leaving the city," he said, "has never been so distant or desirable." Ames denied his first application, but offered him a place the following year, whereupon Cheever decided to sever his "ungainly attachment" to his brother. (Passages in Cheever's journal suggest — without stating conclusively — that his relationship with Fred may have been somewhat homosexual.) Cheever spent the summer of 1934 at Yaddo, which would serve as a second home for much of his life. Dartmouth College is a private, coeducational university located in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the United States. ... Cutting down Beacon Hill, about 1800; a view from the north toward the Massachusetts State House. ... Nickname: Location in Massachusetts, USA Coordinates: , Country United States State Massachusetts County Suffolk County Settled 1630 Incorporated (city) 1822 Government  - Governor Deval Patrick (D) Area  - City  89. ... Yaddo was founded as a nonprofit organization in 1900 by the financier Spencer Trask and his wife Katrina, herself a poet, Nichols Trask, and philanthropist George Foster Peabody. ... Saratoga Springs redirects here. ... NY redirects here. ...

Early writings

For the next few years, Cheever divided his time between Manhattan, Saratoga, Lake George (where he was caretaker of the Yaddo-owned Triuna Island), and Quincy, where he continued to visit his parents, who had reconciled and moved to an apartment at 60 Spear Street. Cheever drove from one place to another in a dilapidated Model A roadster, but had no permanent address. In 1935, Katharine White of The New Yorker bought Cheever's story, "Buffalo," for $45--the first of 121 stories that Cheever would eventually publish in the magazine. In 1938 he began work for the Federal Writers' Project in Washington, D. C., which he considered an embarrassing boondoggle. As an editor for the WPA Guide to New York City, Cheever was charged with (as he put it) "twisting into order the sentences written by some incredibly lazy bastards." He quit after less than a year, and a few months later he met his future wife, Mary Winternitz, daughter of Milton Winternitz, dean of Yale Medical School, and granddaughter of Thomas A. Watson, co-inventor of the telephone. The couple were married in 1941. Lake George, also known as the Queen of American Lakes, is a long narrow lake at the southeast base of the Adirondack Mountains, northern New York, USA. The lake extends about 32. ... Lineup of Ford Model As GAZ-A photographed outside the GAZ plant in 1951. ... Katharine Sergeant Angell White (September 17, 1982 – July 20, 1977) was a writer and the fiction editor for The New Yorker magazine. ... The New Yorker is an American magazine that publishes reportage, criticism, essays, cartoons, poetry and fiction. ... Poster advertising a Federal Writers Project publication. ... ... The Yale School of Medicine is a private medical school located in New Haven, Connecticut. ... Thomas Augustus Watson (18 January 1854 - 13 December 1934) was an assistant to Alexander Graham Bell, notably in the invention of the telephone. ...

Cheever enlisted in the Army on May 7, 1942, and his first collection, The Way Some People Live, was published the following year to mixed reviews. Cheever himself came to despise the book as "embarrassingly immature," and for the rest of his life endeavored to destroy every copy he could lay his hands on. The book arguably saved his life, however, when it fell into the hands of Major Leonard Spigelgass, an MGM executive and officer in the Army Signal Corps, who was struck by Cheever's "childlike sense of wonder." Early that summer, Cheever was transferred to the former Paramount studio in Astoria, Queens, where he commuted via subway from his apartment in Chelsea; meanwhile, most of his old infantry company was slaughtered on Normandy Beach during the D-Day invasion. Cheever's daughter Susan was born on July 31, 1943. American producer and screenwriter Leonard Spigelgass (1908 - 1985) got his start collaborating on the script of Erich Von Stroheims Hello Sister (1933). ... MGM logo Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM, is a large media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of cinema and television programs. ... Branch insignia of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, representing Myers Wigwag The U.S. Army Signal Corps was founded in 1861 by United States Army Major Albert J. Myer, a physician by training. ... Information in this article or section has not been verified against sources and may not be reliable. ... Land on Normandy In military parlance, D-Day is a term often used to denote the day on which a combat attack or operation is to be initiated. ...

After the war, Cheever moved his family to an apartment building at 400 East Fifty-ninth Street, near Sutton Place; almost every morning for the next five years, he would dress in his only suit and take the elevator to a maid's room in the basement, where he stripped to his boxer shorts and wrote until lunchtime. In 1946, he accepted a $4,800 advance from Random House to resume work on his novel, The Holly Tree, put aside during the war. "The Enormous Radio" appeared in the May 17, 1947, issue of The New Yorker--a Kafkaesque tale about a sinister radio that broadcasts the private conversations of tenants in a New York apartment building. A startling advance on Cheever's early, more naturalistic work, the story elicited a fan letter from the magazine's irascible editor, Harold Ross: "It will turn out to be a memorable one, or I am a fish." Cheever's son Benjamin was born on May 4, 1948. Sutton Place is a classically elegant neighborhood. ... // Random House is a publishing house based in New York City. ... Harold Wallace Ross (November 6, 1892 - December 6, 1951) was an American journalist and founder of The New Yorker magazine, which he edited from 1925 to his death. ...

Mid-career

Cheever's work became longer and more complex, bristling against the "slice of life" fiction typical of The New Yorker in those years. An early draft of "The Day the Pig Fell into the Well"--a long story with elaborate Chekhovian nuances, meant to "operate something like a rondo," as Cheever wrote his friend and New Yorker editor William Maxwell--was completed in 1949, though the magazine did not make space for it until five years later. In 1951, Cheever wrote one of his finest stories, "Goodbye, My Brother," after a gloomy summer in Martha's Vineyard. Largely on the strength of these two stories (still in manuscript at the time), Cheever was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. On May 28, 1951, Cheever moved to "Beechwood," the suburban estate of Frank A. Vanderlip in Scarborough-on-Hudson, Westchester, where he rented a small cottage on the edge of the estate. William Keepers Maxwell, Jr (1908-2000) was an American novelist and editor. ... Map of Marthas Vineyard. ... Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded annually by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. ...

Cheever's second collection, The Enormous Radio, was published in 1953. Reviews were mostly positive, though Cheever's reputation continued to suffer because of his close association with The New Yorker (considered middlebrow by many critics), and he was particularly pained by the general preference for J. D. Salinger's Nine Stories, published around the same time. Meanwhile Random House demanded that Cheever either produce a publishable novel or pay back his advance, whereupon Cheever wrote Mike Bessie at Harper & Brothers ("These old bones are up for sale"), who bought him out of his Random House contract. In the summer of 1956, Cheever finished The Wapshot Chronicle while vacationing in Friendship, Maine, and received a congratulatory telegram from William Maxwell: "WELL ROARED LION." With the proceeds from the sale of film rights to "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," Cheever and his family spent the following year in Italy, where his son Federico was born on March 9, 1957 ("We wanted to call him Frederick," Cheever wrote, "but there is of course no K in the alphabet here and I gave up after an hour or two"). Jerome David Salinger (born January 1, 1919) is an American author best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature; he has not published any new work since 1965 and has not granted a formal interview since 1980. ... Nine Stories book cover Nine Stories (1953) is collection of short stories by American fiction writer J. D. Salinger. ... Group portrait of the four Harper brothers by Mathew Brady, ca. ... Official language(s) None (English and French de facto) Capital Augusta Largest city Portland Area  Ranked 39th  - Total 33,414 sq mi (86,542 km²)  - Width 210 miles (338 km)  - Length 320 miles (515 km)  - % water 13. ...

The Wapshot Scandal was published in 1964, and received perhaps the best reviews of Cheever's career up to that point (amid quibbles about the novel's episodic structure). Cheever appeared on the cover of Time magazine's March 27 issue--this for an appreciative profile, "Ovid in Ossining." (In 1961 Cheever had moved to a stately, stone-ended Dutch Colonial farmhouse in Ossining, on the east bank of the Hudson.) "The Swimmer" appeared in the July 18 issue of The New Yorker. Cheever noted with chagrin that the story (one of his best) appeared toward the back of the issue--behind a John Updike story--since, as it happened, Maxwell and other editors at the magazine were a little bewildered by its non-New Yorkerish surrealism. In the summer of 1966, a screen adaptation of "The Swimmer," starring Burt Lancaster, was filmed in Westport, Connecticut, where Cheever was a frequent visitor on the set and did a cameo for the movie. Time (whose trademark is capitalized TIME) is a weekly American newsmagazine, similar to Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. ... The Hudson River, called Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk in Mahican, is a river that runs through the eastern portion of New York State and, along its southern terminus, demarcates the border between the states of New York and New Jersey. ... John Hoyer Updike (born March 18, 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania) is an American writer. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

By then Cheever's alcoholism had become severe, exacerbated by torment over his furtive bisexuality. Still, he managed to blame most of his marital woes on his wife, and in 1966 he consulted a psychiatrist, David C. Hays, about her hostility and "needless darkness." After a session with Mary Cheever, the psychiatrist asked to see the couple jointly; Cheever, heartened, believed his wife's difficult behavior would finally be addressed. At the joint session, however, Dr. Hays announced (as Cheever noted in his journal) that Cheever himself was the problem: "a neurotic man, narcissistic, egocentric, friendless, and so deeply involved in [his] own defensive illusions that [he has] invented a manic-depressive wife." Cheever soon terminated therapy.

Later life and career

Bullet Park was published in 1969, and received a devastating review from Benjamin DeMott on the front page of The New York Times Book Review: "John Cheever's short stories are and will remain lovely birds . . . But in the gluey atmosphere of Bullet Park no birds sing." Cheever's alcoholic depression deepened, and in May he resumed psychiatric treatment (which again proved fruitless). Professor Benjamin Haile DeMott (June 2, 1924, Rockville Centre, New York - September 29, 2005) was an American writer, scholar, and cultural critic. ... The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. ...

On May 12, 1973, Cheever awoke coughing uncontrollably, and learned at the hospital that he had almost died from pulmonary edema caused by alcoholism. After a month in the hospital, he returned home vowing never to drink again; however, he resumed drinking in August. Despite his precarious health, he spent the Fall semester teaching (and drinking) at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where his students included T. C. Boyle, Allan Gurganus, and Ron Hansen. As his marriage continued to deteriorate, Cheever accepted a professorship at Boston University the following year, and moved into a fourth-floor walkup apartment at 71 Bay State Road. Cheever's drinking soon became suicidal, and in March 1975 his brother Fred--now virtually indigent, but sober after his own lifelong bout with alcoholism--drove John back to Ossining. On April 9 Cheever was admitted to the Smithers Alcoholic Rehabilitation Unit in New York, where he shared a bedroom and bath with four other men. Driven home by his wife on May 7, Cheever never drank alcohol again. Pulmonary edema is swelling and/or fluid accumulation in the lungs. ... The Program in Creative Writing, more commonly known as the Iowa Writers Workshop, at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa is a prestigious college and graduate-level creative writing program in the United States. ... T. Coraghessan Boyle (also known as T.C. Boyle, born Thomas John Boyle on December 2, 1948) is a U.S. novelist and short story writer. ... For thirty years, Allan Gurganus has created novels,short stories and essays that constitute a singularly unified and living body of work. ... Ron Hansen (born 1947 in Omaha, Nebraska) is an American novelist, essayist, and professor. ... For similarly-named academic institutions, see Boston (disambiguation). ...

During a teaching junket at the University of Utah in January 1977, Cheever met a Mormon writing student named Max, who for the next five years would be an occasional companion, secretary, and (somewhat reluctantly) lover. Two months later, Cheever appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine with the caption, "A Great American Novel: John Cheever's 'Falconer.'" The novel was Number One on the New York Times Best Seller list for three weeks. The Stories of John Cheever appeared in October 1978, and became one of the most successful collections ever, selling 125,000 copies in hardback and winning universal acclaim. The University of Utah (also The U or the U of U or the UU) is a public university in Salt Lake City, Utah. ... According to Latter Day Saint belief, Mormon is the name of the compiler of the book of scripture known as the Book of Mormon. ... The Newsweek logo Newsweek is a weekly news magazine published in New York City and distributed throughout the United States and internationally. ... The New York Times Best Seller List is a weekly chart in The New York Times newspaper that keeps track of the best-selling books of the week. ...

In the summer of 1981, a tumor was discovered in Cheever's right kidney, and in late-November he returned to the hospital and learned that the cancer had spread to his femur, pelvis, and bladder. Cheever's last novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems, was published in March 1982; only a hundred pages long and relatively inferior (as Cheever himself suspected), the book received respectful reviews in part because it was widely known the author was dying of cancer. On April 27 he received the National Medal for Literature at Carnegie Hall, where colleagues were shocked by Cheever's ravaged appearance after months of cancer therapy. "A page of good prose," he declared in his remarks, "remains invincible." As John Updike remembered, "All the literary acolytes assembled there fell quite silent, astonished by such faith." Cancer is a class of diseases or disorders characterized by uncontrolled division of cells and the ability of these to spread, either by direct growth into adjacent tissue through invasion, or by implantation into distant sites by metastasis (where cancer cells are transported through the bloodstream or lymphatic system). ... Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street. ... John Hoyer Updike (born March 18, 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania) is an American writer. ...

Posthumous

In 1987, Cheever's 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 and Benjamin, became writers. Susan Cheever's memoir, Home Before Dark (1984), revealed Cheever's bisexuality, which was confirmed by his posthumously published letters and journals. Susan Cheever is a New York City writer whose 13 books include , a biography of Alcoholics Anonymous cofounder Bill Wilson; Home Before Dark, a memoir about her father, John Cheever; and five novels. ... Benjamin Hale Cheever, son of John Cheever, has been a reporter for daily newspapers and an editor at Readers Digest. ... Bisexuality is a sexual orientation which refers to the romantic and/or sexual attraction of individuals to other individuals of both their own and the opposite gender or sex. ...

The first biography of Cheever was Scott Donaldson's John Cheever: A Biography (1988). After Blake Bailey published his biography of Richard Yates, Cheever's son Ben suggested he write an authoritative biography of Cheever. The book is expected to be published in 2009.^[1] Richard Yates (February 3, 1926 - November 7, 1992) was an American novelist and short story writer, a chronicler of mid-20th century mainstream American life, often cited as artistically residing somewhere between J.D. Salinger and John Cheever. ... 2009 (MMIX) will be a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Bibliography

• The Way Some People Live (1943)
• The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953)
• Stories (with Jean Stafford, Daniel Fuchs, and William Maxwell) (1956)
• The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)
• The Housebreaker of 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)
• Bullet Park (1969)
• The World of Apples (1973)
• Falconer (1977)
• The Stories of John Cheever (1978)
• Oh, What a Paradise It Seems (1982)
• The Letters of John Cheever (edited by Benjamin Cheever) (1988)
• The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

The Wapshot Chronicle is a 1957 novel by John Cheever about an eccentric family who live a Massachusetts fishing village. ... A John Cheever novel concerned with unhappiness in the suburbs. ... Falconer is a 1977 novel by American writer John Cheever. ... The Stories of John Cheever is a short story collection by American author John Cheever. ...

Notes

Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... June 5 is the 156th day of the year (157th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is now the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... June 11 is the 162nd day of the year (163rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

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