The Wapshot Chronicle was published by Harper and Brothers, New York, in March 1957, in a first printing of approximately 8,000 copies priced at $4.00. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1958. Cheever, already famous as a short-story writer — particularly for his New Yorker stories about suburban Connecticut — had spent years trying to write a novel. The result was less a conventional novel than a loosely connected series of episodes, held together by the Wapshot family and by Cheever’s exuberant, distinctive prose.
The Novel
The Wapshots are an old New England family whose fortune has dwindled to a single asset: the house in St. Botolphs (a fictional Massachusetts coastal town). Leander Wapshot is the patriarch — a sea captain without a ship, a lover of women and weather, a drinker, a philosopher. He keeps a journal in which he records the family history with an unreliable charm that anticipates Cheever’s own narrating voice.
His sons, Moses and Coverly, must leave St. Botolphs to make their way in the wider world. Moses is handsome and sexually confident; Coverly is shy, gentle, and uncertain. Both must marry and produce heirs — a condition of their inheritance, imposed by their forbidding Cousin Honora. Their adventures in Washington, New York, and a missile-testing base form the novel’s picaresque middle sections. Leander, left behind, gradually diminishes: his ferry business fails, his wife grows more dominant, and his sense of himself as a man of consequence fades.
The novel’s tone is unique: Cheever writes with a lyric expansiveness that embraces both comedy and elegy. The Wapshots are ridiculous and magnificent, failures and heroes. Cheever loves them without sentimentality and judges them without cruelty.
Collecting The Wapshot Chronicle
First edition (1957, Harper and Brothers): Approximately 8,000 copies, $4.00.
Identification points:
- Harper and Brothers imprint
- First edition code on copyright page
- Grey cloth binding
- Dust jacket
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $1,500–$4,000
- Signed first edition: $3,000–$8,000
- Without jacket: $100–$300
Value trajectory: Stable demand. Cheever’s reputation has been complicated by the posthumous publication of his journals (1991), which revealed the extent of his alcoholism, his bisexuality, and his self-loathing. But the critical assessment of his work has, if anything, strengthened — he is now seen as a more complex and daring writer than the “Chekhov of the suburbs” label suggested. The Wapshot Chronicle is sought by collectors of postwar American fiction and of National Book Award winners.
Cheever’s New England
St. Botolphs is Cheever’s great fictional creation — a New England town that is simultaneously real and mythological, specific in its details and universal in its themes. It owes something to Hawthorne’s Salem, something to Melville’s New Bedford, and something to the actual towns of the Massachusetts North Shore where Cheever grew up. The novel is a love letter to a place and a way of life that was already anachronistic when Cheever wrote about it — and the awareness of anachronism gives the comedy its undertone of loss.