(The Wapshot Chronicle was published in 1957, John Cheever...)
The Wapshot Chronicle was published in 1957, John Cheever was already recognized as a writer of superb short stories. But The Wapshot Chronicle, which won the 1958 National Book Award, established him as a major novelist.
Based in part on Cheever's adolescence in New England, the novel follows the destinies of the impecunious and wildly eccentric Wapshots of St. Botolphs, a quintessential Massachusetts fishing village.
(Stunning and brutally powerful, Falconer tells the story ...)
Stunning and brutally powerful, Falconer tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back into childhood. Only John Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make Falconer such a triumphant work of the moral imagination.
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In this simultaneously hilarious and poignant companion...)
In this simultaneously hilarious and poignant companion volume to The Wapshot Chronicle, the members of the Wapshot family of St. Botolphs drift far from their New England village into the demented caprices of the mighty, the bad graces of the IRS, and the humiliating abyss of adulterous passion.
A novel of large and tender vision, The Wapshot Scandal is filled with pungent characters and outrageous twists of fate, and, above all, with Cheever's luminous compassion for all his hapless fellow prisoners of human nature.
(Published to coincide with editor Blake Bailey's groundbr...)
Published to coincide with editor Blake Bailey's groundbreaking new biography, here are the five novels of John Cheever, together in one volume for the first time. In these dazzling works, Cheever laid bare the failings and foibles of not just the ascendant postwar elite but also the fallen Yankee aristocrats who stubbornly and often grotesquely and hilariously. Cling to their shabby gentility as the last vestige of former glory.
(Welcome to Bullet Park, a township in which even the most...)
Welcome to Bullet Park, a township in which even the most buttoned-down gentry sometimes manage to terrify themselves simply by looking in the mirror. In these exemplary environs John Cheever traces the fateful intersection of two men: Eliot Nailles, a nice fellow who loves his wife and son to blissful distraction, and Paul Hammer, a bastard named after a common household tool, who, after half a lifetime of drifting, settles down in Bullet Park with one objective to murder Nailles's son. Here is the lyrical and mordantly funny hymn to the American suburb and to all the dubious normalcy it represents delivered with unparalleled artistry and assurance.
John Cheever was an American writer, known for his keen, often critical, view of the American middle class.
Background
Cheever was born May 27, 1912, in Quincy, Massachusetts, United States, to Frederick Lincoln Cheever and Mary Liley Cheever. His father owned a shoe factory until it was lost in the Great Depression of the 1930. His mother, an English - woman who emigrated with her parents, supported her husband and their two sons with the profits from a gift shop she operated. This is Cheever Country: a seemingly happy New England marriage that when poked reveals a relationship strained to the point of breaking.
Education
Cheever was sent to Thayer Academy, a prep school in Milton, Massachusetts.
Career
Cheever's first published work, "Expelled" - a short story that appeared in The New Republic on October 1, 1930. The story is an embryonic version in style and approach of the Cheever to evolve over five decades; it revels in the details of ordinary lives with precise observation and disciplined language.
Cheever toured Europe with his brother, Frederick, who was seven years his senior. He then settled in Boston, where he met Hazel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, both of whom helped support the budding writer. In the mid-1930 Cheever moved to New York City, where he lived and worked in a bleak, $3-a-week boarding house on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village. During this period he helped support himself by writing synopses of books for potential M. G. M. movies.
Malcolm Cowley, editor of The New Republic, arranged for Cheever to spend time at Yaddo, a writers' colony in Saratoga to which the author would often return. It was also during this time that Cheever began his long association with The New Yorker.
In 1934 the first of 119 Cheever stories was published in this sophisticated magazine. He spent four years in the army during World War II and later spent two years writing television scripts for, among other programs, "Life with Father. "
In 1943 Cheever's first book of short stories, The Way Some People Live, was published. War and the Depression serve as a backdrop for these stories which deal with Cheever's lifelong subject: simply, the way some people live.
The Enormous Radio, and Other Stories, written in Cheever's Scarborough, New York, home, was published in 1953. The 14 stories plunge the reader deep into Cheever Country; the characters - nice people all - begin with a sense of well-being and order that is stripped away and never quite fully restored.
In 1955 his short story, "The Five-Forty-Eight, " was awarded the Benjamin Franklin magazine award. Upon their return the family settled in Ossining, New York. He won the National Book Award for the first of his novels, The Wapshot Chronicle. Cheever followed The Wapshot Chronicle with The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (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), and Falconer (1977).
Earlier, in 1972, he had suffered a massive heart attack. After a long period of recovery he wrote the dark Falconer, which draws on his experience as a writing instructor in Sing Sing prison as well as on his recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction. John Cheever died on June 18, 1982, of cancer. His final work, Oh What A Paradise It Seems, was published posthumously.
(The Wapshot Chronicle was published in 1957, John Cheever...)
Views
Quotations:
"I have been a storyteller since the beginning of my life, rearranging facts in order to make them more significant. I have improvised a background for myself-genteel, traditional-and it is generally accepted. " - John Cheever, in his journal, 1961.
Membership
National Institute of Arts and Letters
1957
Personality
At the height of his success, Cheever began a 20-year struggle with alcoholism, a problem he didn't fully admit to until his family placed him in a rehabilitation center in 1975.
Quotes from others about the person
Psychiatrist, David C. Hays characterized John Cheever "a neurotic man, narcissistic, egocentric, friendless, and so deeply involved in (his) own defensive illusions that (he has) invented a manic-depressive wife."
Connections
On March 22, 1941, Cheever married Mary Winternitz. They had 3 children: Susan, Benjamin, Federico.