John Cheever
John Cheever, (b. May 27, 1912, Quincy,
Massachusetts, U.S.—d. June 18, 1982,
Ossining, New York), American
short-story writer and novelist whose
work describes, often through fantasy
and ironic comedy, the life, manners,
and morals of middle-class, suburban
America. Cheever has been called “the
Chekhov of the suburbs” for his ability
to capture the drama and sadness of the
lives of his characters by revealing the
undercurrents of apparently
insignificant events. Known as a
moralist, he judges his characters from
the standpoint of traditional morality.
Cheever himself was born into a
middle-class family, his father being
employed in the shoe business then
booming in New England. With the
eventual failure of the shoe industry
and the difficulties of his parents’
marriage, he had an unhappy adolescence.
His expulsion at age 17 from the Thayer
Academy in Massachusetts provided the
theme for his first published story,
which appeared in The New Republic in
1930. During the Great Depression he
lived in New York City’s Greenwich
Village. Cheever married in 1941 and had
three children. In 1942 he enlisted in
the army to train as an infantryman, but
the army soon reassigned him to the
Signal Corps as a scriptwriter for
training films. After the war Cheever
and his wife moved from New York City to
the suburbs, whose culture and mores are
often examined in his subsequent
fiction.
Cheever’s name was closely associated
with The New Yorker, a periodical that
published many of his stories, but his
works also appeared in The New Republic,
Collier’s, Story, and The Atlantic. A
master of the short story, Cheever
worked from “the interrupted event,”
which he considered the prime source of
short stories. He was famous for his
clear and elegant prose and his careful
fashioning of incidents and anecdotes.
He is perhaps best-known for the two
stories “The Enormous Radio” (1947) and
“The Swimmer” (1964; filmed 1968). In
the former story a young couple
discovers that their new radio receives
the conversations of other people in
their apartment building but that this
fascinating look into other people’s
problems does not solve their own. In
“The Swimmer” a suburban man decides to
swim his way home in the backyard pools
of his neighbours and finds on the way
that he is a lost soul in several
senses. Cheever’s first collection of
short stories, The Way Some People Live
(1943), was followed by many others,
including The Enormous Radio and Other
Stories (1953) and The Brigadier and the
Golf Widow (1964). The Stories of John
Cheever (1978) won the Pulitzer Prize
for fiction.
Cheever’s ability in his short stories
to focus on the episodic caused him
difficulty in constructing extended
narratives in his novels. Nonetheless,
his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle
(1957)—a satire on, among other
subjects, the misuses of wealth and
psychology—earned him the National Book
Award. Its sequel, The Wapshot Scandal
(1964), was less successful. Falconer
(1977) is the dark tale of a
drug-addicted college professor who is
imprisoned for murdering his brother. Oh
What a Paradise It Seems (1982) is an
elegiac story about a New Englander’s
efforts to preserve the quality of his
life and that of a mill town’s pond. The
Letters of John Cheever, edited by his
son Benjamin Cheever, was published in
1988, and in 1991 The Journals of John
Cheever appeared. The latter is deeply
revealing of both the man and the
writer.
