John Cheever

John Cheever (1912-1982), American writer, best known for his short stories dealing with the ironies of contemporary American life. Born in Quincy, Massachusetts, Cheever was expelled from preparatory school in 1929; rather than seek further formal education, he wrote a story, “Expelled,” about his expulsion and submitted it to the magazine The New Republic, which published it in 1930. Cheever lived in New York City during the 1930s. His stories typically are subtle and finely worked comedies of manners, concerned with middle-class suburbanites. His characters tend to be less specific than symbolic, although the situations in his narratives are realistic and detailed. Cheever's work often portrays individuals who yearn for self-expression within a society whose values make it difficult to achieve this freedom. He was skilled in using seemingly insignificant events in his characters' lives to expose their emotional complexities.

Beginning in the 1930s, Cheever's stories were originally published in various prominent magazines, notably The New Yorker, and were subsequently collected in several volumes: The Way Some People Live (1943), The Enormous Radio (1954), The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958), The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964), and The World of Apples (1973). An omnibus edition, The Stories of John Cheever (1978), won him the 1979 Pulitzer Prize in literature. As a novelist, Cheever is noted for The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) and its sequel, The Wapshot Scandal (1964); the first volume received a National Book Award in 1958. These novels deal with the wealthy, eccentric Wapshot family in suburban Massachusetts and expand on themes that Cheever explored in his shorter fiction. Much more somber commentaries on modern family life are found in his later novels: Bullet Park (1969), which deals with a suburban family threatened with violence, and Falconer (1977), the story of a drug-addicted college professor imprisoned for fratricide. Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982), a very short novel, marked a return to Cheever's more amused and hopeful contemplation of contemporary life. The Journals of John Cheever was published posthumously in 1991.