John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American short story writer and novelist. He is sometimes called "the
Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set on the
Upper East Side of
Manhattan
Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...
; the
Westchester suburbs; old
New England
New England is a region consisting of six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York (state), New York to the west and by the ...
villages based on various
South Shore towns around
Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born; and Italy, especially
Rome
Rome (Italian language, Italian and , ) is the capital city and most populated (municipality) of Italy. It is also the administrative centre of the Lazio Regions of Italy, region and of the Metropolitan City of Rome. A special named with 2, ...
. His short stories included "
The Enormous Radio", "
Goodbye, My Brother", "
The Five-Forty-Eight", "
The Country Husband", and "
The Swimmer", and he also wrote five novels: ''
The Wapshot Chronicle'' (
National Book Award
The National Book Awards (NBA) are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors. ...
, 1958),
["National Book Awards – 1958"](_blank)
National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-14.
(With essay by Neil Baldwinbr>
from the Award's 50-year anniversary publications and from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
''
The Wapshot Scandal'' (
William Dean Howells Medal
The William Dean Howells Medal is awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, Music ...
, 1965), ''
Bullet Park'' (1969), ''
Falconer'' (1977) and a novella, ''
Oh What a Paradise It Seems'' (1982).
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 a
National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award.
["National Book Awards – 1981"]
National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-14.
With essays by Willie Perdomo, Matthew Pitt, and Robert Wilder from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.[Cheever's ''Stories'' won the 1981 award for paperback Fiction. ]
From 1980 to 1983 in National Book Awards history there were dual hardcover and paperback awards in most categories. Most of the paperback award-winners were reprints, including this one.
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
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, Music of the United States, music, and Visual art of the United States, art. Its fixed number ...
. His work has been included in the
Library of America.
Early life and education
John William Cheever was born in
Quincy, Massachusetts, 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, at 123 Winthrop Avenue, in the then-genteel suburb of
Wollaston, Massachusetts. In the mid-1920s, 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 John saw it. In 1926, Cheever began attending
Thayer Academy, a private day school, but he found the atmosphere stifling and performed poorly, and finally transferred to
Quincy High in 1928. A year later, he won a short story contest sponsored by the ''
Boston Herald
The ''Boston Herald'' is an American conservative daily newspaper whose primary market is Boston, Massachusetts, and its surrounding area. It was founded in 1846 and is one of the oldest daily newspapers in the United States. It has been awarde ...
'' 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 18-year-old Cheever wrote a sardonic account of this experience, titled "
Expelled", which was subsequently published in ''
The New Republic
''The New Republic'' (often abbreviated as ''TNR'') is an American magazine focused on domestic politics, news, culture, and the arts from a left-wing perspective. It publishes ten print magazines a year and a daily online platform. ''The New Y ...
''.
Around this time, Cheever's older brother, Fred, forced to withdraw from
Dartmouth in 1926 because of the family's financial crisis, re-entered Cheever's life "when the situation was most painful and critical", as Cheever later wrote. After the 1932
crash of
Kreuger & Toll, 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
Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...
. In 1933, John wrote to Elizabeth Ames, the director of the
Yaddo artist's colony in
Saratoga Springs, New York
Saratoga Springs is a Administrative divisions of New York#City, city in Saratoga County, New York, United States. The population was 28,491 at the United States Census 2020, 2020 census. The name reflects the presence of mineral springs in the ...
: "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. Cheever spent the summer of 1934 at Yaddo, which would serve as a second home for much of his life.
Career
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
''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
'' bought Cheever's story "Buffalo" for $45—the first of many that Cheever would publish in the magazine.
Maxim Lieber became his literary agent, 1935–1941. 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, seven years his junior.
She was a daughter of Milton Winternitz, dean of
Yale Medical School, and granddaughter of
Thomas A. Watson, an assistant to Alexander Graham Bell during the invention of the telephone. They married in 1941.
Cheever enlisted as an
infantry
Infantry, or infantryman are a type of soldier who specialize in ground combat, typically fighting dismounted. Historically the term was used to describe foot soldiers, i.e. those who march and fight on foot. In modern usage, the term broadl ...
man in the
U.S. Army on May 7, 1942.
[John Cheever: American author](_blank)
''Encyclopædia Britannica
The is a general knowledge, general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. since 1768, although the company has changed ownership seven times. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, ...
''. Retrieved January 17, 2024. He was later reassigned to the
Signal Corps
A signal corps is a military branch, responsible for military communications (''signals''). Many countries maintain a signal corps, which is typically subordinate to a country's army.
Military communication usually consists of radio, telephone, ...
.
His first collection of short stories, ''The Way Some People Live'', was published in 1943 to mixed reviews. Cheever himself came to despise the book as "embarrassingly immature", and for the rest of his life destroyed every copy he could lay his hands on. However, the book may have saved his life after falling into the hands of Major
Leonard Spigelgass, an
MGM
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, commonly shortened to MGM or MGM Studios) is an American Film production, film and television production and film distribution, distribution company headquartered ...
executive and officer in the 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, New York City, where he commuted via subway from his apartment in
Chelsea, Manhattan, New York City. Meanwhile, most of his old infantry company was killed on a Normandy beach during the
D-Day invasion. Cheever's daughter Susan was born on July 31, 1943.
After the war, Cheever and his family moved to an apartment building at 400 East 59th Street, near
Sutton Place, Manhattan; 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
Random House is an imprint and publishing group of Penguin Random House. Founded in 1927 by businessmen Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer as an imprint of Modern Library, it quickly overtook Modern Library as the parent imprint. Over the foll ...
to resume work on his novel, ''The Holly Tree'', which he had discontinued 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.
Mid-career
Cheever's work became longer and more complex, apparently a protest 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
The rondo or rondeau is a musical form that contains a principal theme (music), theme (sometimes called the "refrain") which alternates with one or more contrasting themes (generally called "episodes", but also referred to as "digressions" or "c ...
", as Cheever wrote to 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 "Goodbye, My Brother", after a gloomy summer in
Martha's Vineyard
Martha's Vineyard, often simply called the Vineyard, is an island in the U.S. state of Massachusetts, lying just south of Cape Cod. It is known for being a popular, affluent summer colony, and includes the smaller peninsula Chappaquiddick Isla ...
. Largely on the strength of these two stories (still in manuscript at the time), Cheever was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...
. On May 28, 1951, Cheever moved to
Beechwood, the suburban estate of Frank A. Vanderlip, a banker,
["How Cheever Really Felt About Living in Suburbia"](_blank)
by Joseph Berger, ''The New York Times'', April 30, 2009 (p. CT1, 5/3/09, CT ed.). Retrieved 5/2/09. in the Westchester hamlet of
Scarborough-on-Hudson, where he rented a small cottage on the edge of the estate. The house, coincidentally, had been occupied before the Cheevers by another suburban chronicler,
Richard Yates. In Scarborough, he was a casual volunteer for the
Briarcliff Manor Fire Department.
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 such influential critics as
Dwight Macdonald), 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
Harper is an American publishing house, the flagship Imprint (trade name), imprint of global publisher HarperCollins, based in New York City. Founded in New York in 1817 by James Harper (publisher), James Harper and his brother John, the compan ...
("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").
''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
Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...
'' 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, 1964, 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
John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tar ...
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. Cheever was a frequent visitor on the set, and made a cameo appearance in the movie.
By then Cheever's alcoholism had become severe, exacerbated by torment concerning his bisexuality. Still, he blamed 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, Hays said (as Cheever noted in his journal) that Cheever himself was the problem: "a neurotic man, narcissistic, egocentric, friendless, and so deeply involved in
isown defensive illusions that
e hasinvented 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). He began an affair with actress
Hope Lange in the late 1960s.
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, both with fellow writer-teacher,
Raymond Carver) 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
Boston University (BU) is a Private university, private research university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. BU was founded in 1839 by a group of Boston Methodism, Methodists with its original campus in Newbury (town), Vermont, Newbur ...
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.
In March 1977, Cheever appeared on the cover of ''
Newsweek
''Newsweek'' is an American weekly news magazine based in New York City. Founded as a weekly print magazine in 1933, it was widely distributed during the 20th century and has had many notable editors-in-chief. It is currently co-owned by Dev P ...
'' with the caption, "A Great American Novel: John Cheever's ''
Falconer.''" The novel was No. 1 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.
Cheever was awarded the
Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts by the
MacDowell Colony in 1979.
Personal life
Cheever's marriage was damaged by his unfaithfulness.
He had relationships with both men and women, including a short relationship with composer
Ned Rorem and an affair with actress
Hope Lange. Cheever's longest affair was with a student of his, Max Zimmer,
who lived in the Cheever family home. Cheever's daughter, Susan, described her parents' marriage as "European", saying: "they were people who felt their feelings weren't necessarily a reason to shatter a family. They certainly hurt each other plenty but they didn't necessarily see that as a reason for divorce."
Illness and death
In the summer of 1981, a tumor was discovered in Cheever's right lung, and, in late November, he returned to the hospital and learned that the cancer had spread to his femur, pelvis, and bladder. His last novel, ''
Oh What a Paradise It Seems,'' was published in March 1982. On April 27, he received the National Medal for Literature at
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall ( ) is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It is at 881 Seventh Avenue (Manhattan), Seventh Avenue, occupying the east side of Seventh Avenue between 56th Street (Manhattan), 56th and 57th Street (Manhattan), 57t ...
, where colleagues were shocked by his ravaged appearance after months of cancer therapy. "A page of good prose", he declared in his remarks, "remains invincible."
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tar ...
wrote that "All the literary acolytes assembled there fell quite silent, astonished by such faith."
When Cheever died on June 18, 1982, flags in Ossining were lowered to half staff for ten days.
He is buried at First Parish Cemetery,
Norwell, Massachusetts.
Posthumous
In 1987, Cheever's widow, Mary, signed a contract with a small publisher,
Academy Chicago Publishers, for the right to publish Cheever's uncollected short stories. The contract led to a long legal battle, eventually resulting in ''
Thirteen Uncollected Stories by John Cheever'', published in 1994 by Academy Chicago.
Two of Cheever's children,
Susan
Susan is a feminine given name, the usual English version of Susanna or Susannah. All are versions of the Hebrew name Shoshana, which is derived from the Hebrew ''shoshan'', meaning ''lotus flower'' in Egyptian, original derivation, and severa ...
and
Benjamin
Benjamin ( ''Bīnyāmīn''; "Son of (the) right") blue letter bible: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h3225/kjv/wlc/0-1/ H3225 - yāmîn - Strong's Hebrew Lexicon (kjv) was the younger of the two sons of Jacob and Rachel, and Jacob's twe ...
, became writers. Susan's memoir, ''Home Before Dark'' (1984), revealed Cheever's sexual relationships with both women and men, which was confirmed by his posthumously published letters and journals. This was parodied to comedic effect in
a 1992 episode of the TV sitcom ''
Seinfeld
''Seinfeld'' ( ) is an American television sitcom created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld that originally aired on NBC from July 5, 1989, to May 14, 1998, with a total of nine seasons consisting of List of Seinfeld episodes, 180 episodes. It ...
'', when the character Susan discovers explicit love letters from Cheever to her father.
After
Blake Bailey published his biography of
Richard Yates, ''A Tragic Honesty'' (2003), Cheever's son Ben suggested Bailey write an authoritative biography of Cheever. It was published by
Knopf on March 10, 2009, and won that year's
National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography and the
Francis Parkman Prize, and was a finalist for the
Pulitzer and
James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Also in 2009, Cheever was featured in ''Soul of a People: Writing America's Story'', a 90-minute documentary about the WPA Writers' Project. His life during the 1930s is also highlighted in the companion book, ''Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America''.
Works
Novels
* ''
The Wapshot Chronicle'' (1957)
* ''
The Wapshot Scandal'' (1964)
* ''
Bullet Park'' (1969)
* ''
Falconer'' (1977)
* ''
Oh What a Paradise It Seems'' (1982)
Short story collections
* ''
The Way Some People Live'' (1943)
* ''
The Enormous Radio and Other Stories'' (1953)
* ''
The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories'' (1958)
* ''
Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel'' (1961)
* ''
The Brigadier and the Golf Widow'' (1964)
* ''
The World of Apples'' (1973)
* ''
The Stories of John Cheever'' (1978)
*''
Thirteen Uncollected Stories by John Cheever'' (1994)
*''A Vision of the World: Selected Short Stories'' (2021)
Collections
* ''The Letters of John Cheever'', edited by Benjamin Cheever (1988)
* ''The Journals of John Cheever'' (1991)
* ''Collected Stories & Other Writings'' (
Library of America) (stories, 2009)
* ''Complete Novels'' (Library of America) (novels, 2009)
Short stories
Notes
References
External links
''The New York Times'', Times Topics: John Cheever*
*
*
ttps://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/magazine/01cheever-t.html "The First Suburbanite", Charles McGrath, ''The New York Times Sunday Magazine'', March 1, 2009Cheever and Updike on ''The Dick Cavett Show'' (1981)
"Commuter Literate", Matthew Price, ''Bookforum'', Apr/May 2009
"Upstate", by Christen Enos, ''Open Letters''2008
John Cheever literary manuscripts at Brandeis UniversityStephen Banker audio interview of John Cheever, circa 1977
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cheever, John
1912 births
1982 deaths
20th-century American LGBTQ people
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American non-fiction writers
20th-century American novelists
20th-century American short story writers
20th-century American diarists
American bisexual writers
American LGBTQ military personnel
American LGBTQ novelists
American male non-fiction writers
American male novelists
American male short story writers
Bisexual academics
Bisexual male writers
Boston University faculty
Deaths from kidney cancer in New York (state)
Federal Writers' Project people
Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty
LGBTQ people from Massachusetts
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Military personnel from Massachusetts
National Book Award winners
Novelists from Iowa
Novelists from Massachusetts
Novelists from Utah
O. Henry Award winners
People from Briarcliff Manor, New York
People from Chelsea, Manhattan
People from Norwell, Massachusetts
People from Ossining, New York
People from Quincy, Massachusetts
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners
Quincy High School (Massachusetts) alumni
Thayer Academy alumni
United States Army personnel of World War II
United States Army Signal Corps personnel
University of Iowa faculty
University of Utah faculty
Writers from Quincy, Massachusetts
National Book Critics Circle Award winners