From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John William Cheever (May
27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American novelist
and short
story writer. Sometimes called
"the Chekhov of
the suburbs,"
his fiction is mostly set in the Upper
East Side of
Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs,
old
New England villages based on
various
South Shore towns around Quincy,
Massachusetts, where he was born, and
Italy, especially Rome.
He is "now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of
the twentieth
century."[2] While
Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including "The
Enormous Radio," "Goodbye, My Brother," "The
Five-Forty-Eight," "The Country Husband," and "The
Swimmer"), he also wrote a number of novels, such as The
Wapshot Chronicle (National
Book Award, 1958), The
Wapshot Scandal (William
Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet
Park (1969), and Falconer (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. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life
(as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels),
characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of
community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia.
A compilation of his short stories, The
Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction and the National
Book Critics Circle Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death,
Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library
of America.