John Cheever

John William Cheever (1912–1982) was born on 27 May 1912 in Quincy, Massachusetts, the son of a shoe salesman whose business failed during the Depression and a mother who opened a gift shop to support the family. Cheever was expelled from Thayer Academy at seventeen — he turned the experience into a story, “Expelled,” published in The New Republic in 1930, which launched his literary career.

Life and Career

Cheever moved to New York and became a New Yorker writer — eventually the most identified with the magazine since J.D. Salinger. He published over 120 stories in The New Yorker between 1935 and 1981, more than any other writer. The relationship defined his career and his limitations: the New Yorker provided a steady income and a prestige platform, but its house style — polished, understated, ironic — both shaped and constrained his ambitions.

His first collection, The Way Some People Live (1943), was followed by the stories and novels that established his reputation: The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953), The Wapshot Chronicle (1957, National Book Award), The Wapshot Scandal (1964), Bullet Park (1969), and Falconer (1977). The Stories of John Cheever (1978) collected sixty-one stories, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and became a bestseller — an unusual commercial success for a story collection.

Beneath the surface of suburban respectability, Cheever’s life was tormented. He was bisexual — a fact concealed during his lifetime and revealed after his death by his journals (published 1991) and by his daughter Susan’s memoir. He was an alcoholic who drank through much of his career. He spent most of his adult life in suburban Westchester County — Scarborough and Ossining — and his fiction draws its power from the tension between the orderly surfaces of suburban life and the chaos beneath.

Cheever got sober in 1975 after a stay at the Smithers center. Falconer (1977), a novel about a fratricidal drug addict in prison, was his most ambitious and most critically acclaimed work of fiction, written in sobriety. He died of cancer on 18 June 1982 at his home in Ossining.

Major Works and Themes

Cheever’s fiction is set in the commuter suburbs of New York’s Westchester County and in the apartment buildings of the Upper East Side — a world of cocktail parties, swimming pools, train schedules, and quiet desperation. His characters are outwardly successful — stockbrokers, advertising men, well-dressed wives — but inwardly haunted by loneliness, sexual frustration, alcoholism, and a spiritual emptiness that they can neither name nor escape.

“The Swimmer” (1964) is his most famous story: Neddy Merrill decides to swim home across his neighbours’ pools on a summer afternoon; the journey becomes an allegory of decline, loss, and self-deception. It is one of the most anthologised American stories.

“The Enormous Radio” (1947) — in which a couple’s new radio picks up the conversations of their neighbours, revealing the misery behind closed doors — is the quintessential Cheever fable.

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) and The Wapshot Scandal (1964) trace the decline of a New England family with the comedy and melancholy that are Cheever’s signature registers.

The Journals

The Journals of John Cheever (1991), edited by Robert Gottlieb and published nine years after Cheever’s death, was one of the most revelatory posthumous publications in American letters. The journals — kept from 1948 to 1982, running to over four thousand pages — revealed a man consumed by self-loathing, bisexual desire, alcoholism, and an anguished relationship with his own talent. Entries oscillate between precise, beautiful observations of the natural world and searing self-examination. “The only way to write is to write well, and how this is done I do not know,” he wrote. The journals transformed understanding of Cheever’s fiction: the suburban surfaces he described so precisely were screens behind which he was fighting for his life.

Blake Bailey’s biography Cheever: A Life (2009) deepened the portrait, documenting his affairs with both men and women, his cruelty to his family, and the heroism of his final sober years. Cheever’s son Benjamin published The Letters of John Cheever (1988), which further illuminated the divided life.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Cheever was admired throughout his career but was often pigeonholed as a “suburban” writer — a label that underestimated his formal inventiveness, his mythic imagination, and his dark vision. He is now recognised as one of the major American short story writers, alongside Hemingway, O’Connor, and Carver — a writer whose polished surfaces conceal depths of feeling as intense as anything in American fiction.

Collecting Cheever

John Cheever is a modestly but steadily collected author, anchored by The Stories of John Cheever.

The Way Some People Live (1943, Random House) is his first book and a genuine rarity — printed during wartime in a small edition. Fine copies in jacket bring $2,000–$8,000.

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957, Harper & Brothers) first editions in jacket bring $300–$1,000.

The Stories of John Cheever (1978, Knopf) is the most widely sought title. First editions in jacket bring $100–$400.

Falconer (1977, Knopf) first editions in jacket bring $100–$400.

Signed copies are available — Cheever was a cooperative signer. His journals, published posthumously in an abridged edition by Robert Gottlieb (1991, Knopf), are an important literary document and a secondary collecting target.