The Stories of John Cheever was published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, on 23 October 1978, in a first printing priced at $15.00. The collection was a publishing phenomenon: a 693-page book of short stories became a bestseller, spent months on the New York Times list, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1979), the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award — a clean sweep. It sold over 125,000 copies in hardcover, numbers that story collections almost never achieve. Cheever, who had struggled with alcoholism and near-poverty for much of his career, was suddenly, at sixty-six, successful on a scale he had never imagined.
The Collection
Cheever selected sixty-one stories from over two hundred published between 1947 and 1978, mostly in The New Yorker. The selection is both a retrospective and a statement of ambition: Cheever wanted these stories to be read not as occasional pieces but as a coherent body of work, a social novel told in fragments.
The early stories (“Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Enormous Radio,” “O Youth and Beauty!”) are set in Manhattan and Westchester and deal with marriage, class, and the precariousness of middle-class respectability. The middle-period stories (“The Country Husband,” “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” “The Swimmer”) are Cheever’s most famous — comedies of suburban life that darken, imperceptibly, into something stranger and more desperate. The late stories (“The World of Apples,” “Percy,” “The Jewels of the Cabots”) are more experimental and melancholy, reflecting Cheever’s awareness of mortality and his growing sense that the world he had chronicled was disappearing.
“The Swimmer” is the collection’s centrepiece: Neddy Merrill decides to swim home across the county by way of his neighbours’ swimming pools, and the afternoon journey becomes a journey through time, ending in cold rain at a locked, empty house. It is one of the greatest short stories in the English language.
Collecting The Stories of John Cheever
First edition (1978, Knopf): First printing, $15.00.
Identification points:
- “FIRST EDITION” stated on copyright page
- Knopf borzoi device
- Grey cloth binding
- Dust jacket with photograph of Cheever
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $300–$800
- Signed first edition: $1,000–$3,000
- Without jacket: $50–$150
Value trajectory: Moderate. The large first printing (reflecting the collection’s bestseller status) keeps values accessible. Cheever died in 1982, so signed copies are available but finite. The collection’s importance in the short-story canon and its Pulitzer Prize ensure continued collector interest. This is an accessible entry point for new collectors of postwar American fiction.
The Cheever Revival
The collection’s success was itself a kind of resurrection. By the mid-1970s, Cheever was widely considered a spent force — his novels had been poorly received, his alcoholism was severe, and younger writers had eclipsed him. The Stories reminded the literary world of what Cheever could do. The collection, combined with his sobriety (he entered rehabilitation in 1975) and his final novel Falconer (1977), constituted one of the great late-career comebacks in American letters.