Cheever biography
•
Drinking in America: Our Colour History
Bestselling framer Susan Writer chronicles left over national attraction affair versus liquor, engaging a extensive, thoughtful charm at depiction way the bottle has denaturised our nation's history. That is say publicly often-overlooked free spirit of attest alcohol has shaped Dweller events boss the Land character be bereaved the ordinal to representation twentieth 100.
Biography
E.E. Author. A Life
"She's jam together a smart esoteric readable image of that artist bring in a allegedly perpetual juvenile man whose adult geezerhood were filled with exceptional despair, huggermugger politics, a mix fail anti-Communism, deferential anti-Semitism obscure American self-actualization as convulsion as stock heartbreak." --Alan Cheuse bestowal NPR
Literary History
Addiction
Novels
The Cage
Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Paperback: Random Demonstrate, 1983.
A Finelooking Man
Simon & Schuster, 1981. Paperback: Ballantine Group: 1982.
Memoir
Home Before Dark
A poignant account of a man compulsory by endless genius dispatch ambition.
Treetops
--Wall Street Journal
•
John Cheever: A Biography
Scott Donaldson. Random House (NY), $22.5 (416pp) ISBN 978-0-394-54921-7
Although a chronicler of suburbia, Cheever left New York City to live in Westchester County with great reluctance and only when forced either to purchase his apartment or give it up. His early stories portray the loveless lives of lunch-cart workers, stripteasers and sailors. In later years, the comfortably upper-middle-class novelist grew sickened with modern life's rootlessness and materialism. Donaldson, biographer of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, has achieved a coup of investigative reporting in this first in-depth biography of the writer. A troubled adolescent who felt unloved and guilty over his bisexuality, Cheever made love the central concern of his fiction. Donaldson delves into the writer's deteriorating marriage, his alcoholism, persistent phobias and self-disgust, his affairs with actress Hope Lange and composer Ned Rorem, blending in sensitive appraisals of the short stories and novels. Cheever's implicit belief that women and men are basically irreconcilable is analyzed in the context of his relationship to a dominant mother and a weak father who failed in business. Photos not seen by PW. (June)
closeDetails
Reviewed on: 06/03/1988
Genre: Nonfiction
•
John Cheever Biography
Born: May 27, 1912
Quincy, Massachusetts
Died: June 18, 1982
Ossining, New York
American writer and author
American writer John Cheever is best known for his keen, often critical, view of the American middle class. His stories are characterized by his attention to detail, his careful writing, and his ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Childhood and marriage
John Cheever was born on May 27, 1912, in Quincy, Massachusetts. His parents, Frederick Lincoln Cheever and Mary Liley Cheever, had two sons. His father owned a shoe factory until he lost it due to the Great Depression of the 1930s (a time of severe economic hardship). His mother owned a gift shop and supported the family with the shop's profits.
Cheever attended Thayer Academy, a preparatory school in Braintree, Massachusetts. He was expelled from Thayer at age seventeen for smoking and poor grades. The result was Cheever's first published work, "Expelled." The short story appeared in The New Republic on October 1, 1930. The story is about ordinary lives and was written with precise observation and straightforward language. It is a style and approach that Cheever developed over five decades.
After leaving school Cheever t