John Cheever
Overview
John William Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...

 of the suburbs." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side
Upper East Side
The Upper East Side is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, between Central Park and the East River. The Upper East Side lies within an area bounded by 59th Street to 96th Street, and the East River to Fifth Avenue-Central Park...

 of Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

, the Westchester
Westchester County, New York
Westchester County is a county located in the U.S. state of New York. Westchester covers an area of and has a population of 949,113 according to the 2010 Census, residing in 45 municipalities...

 suburbs, old New England
New England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...

 villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts
Quincy, Massachusetts
Quincy is a city in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States. Its nicknames are "City of Presidents", "City of Legends", and "Birthplace of the American Dream". As a major part of Metropolitan Boston, Quincy is a member of Boston's Inner Core Committee for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council...

, where he was born, and Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

, especially Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

. He is "now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century." While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including "The Enormous Radio
The Enormous Radio
The Enormous Radio is a short story written by John Cheever in 1947. It first appeared in the May 17, 1947 issue of The New Yorker and was later collected in The Enormous Radio and Other Stories...

," "Goodbye, My Brother," "The Five-Forty-Eight
The Five-Forty-Eight
"The Five-Forty-Eight" is a 1954 short story by John Cheever published in The Stories of John Cheever, though it may have been published previously. The story is about a businessman called Blake, who is accosted on a train at gunpoint by his former secretary, named Miss Dent...

," "The Country Husband," and "The Swimmer
The Swimmer
"The Swimmer" a short story by American author John Cheever, published in 1964 in the short story collection The Brigadier and the Golf Widow. Originally conceived as a novel and pared down from over 150 pages of notes, it is probably Cheever's most famous and frequently anthologized story...

"), he also wrote a number of novels, such as The Wapshot Chronicle
The Wapshot Chronicle
The Wapshot Chronicle is the debut novel by John Cheever about an eccentric family that lives in a Massachusetts fishing village. Published in 1957, the book won the National Book Award in 1958, and was later followed by a sequel, The Wapshot Scandal, published in 1964.The Wapshot Chronicle is the...

(National Book Award
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...

, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), and Falconer
Falconer (novel)
Falconer is a 1977 novel by American short-story writer and novelist John Cheever. It tells the story of Ezekiel Farragut, a university professor and drug addict who is serving time in Falconer State Prison for the murder of his brother...

(1977).

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.
Quotations

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man’s complexity and the strength and decency of his longings. Where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.

Accepting National Book Award, The Writer (September 1958)

He was a tall man with an astonishing and somehow elegant curvature of the spine, formed by an enlarged lower abdomen, which he carried in a stately and contented way, as if it contained money and securities.

Description of a Yankee rector

Homesickness is nothing … Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

“The Bella Lingua” in The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964)

Art is the triumph over chaos.

The Stories of John Cheever Knopf (1978)

I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.

Christian Science Monitor (October 24, 1979)

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.

Accepting Edward MacDowell Medal|Edward MacDowell Medal (September 8, 1979)

A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.

Quoted in James Charlton's The Writer’s Quotation Book (1980)

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. [It] has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

Accepting National Medal for Literature (April 27, 1982)

I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another’s river views.

“Moving Out” Esquire (June 1983)

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places. That’s the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

Quoted by Susan Cheever, Home before Dark Houghton Mifflin (1984)

 
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