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Authors
John Cheever (1912-1982)
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Cheever’s seven volumes of short stories, which appeared between 1943 and 1973, are assembled in The Stories of John Cheever (1978); The Uncollected Stories of John Cheever appeared posthumously in 1988. His novels are The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), The Wapshot Scandal (1964), Bullet Park(1969), Falconer (1977), and Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). The Letters of John Cheever, edited by his son, Benjamin Cheever, was published in 1988. The Journals of John Cheever (1991) was edited by Robert Gottlieb. Scott Donaldson’s John Cheever (1988) is a full-length biography. Home before Dark (1984), by his daughter, Susan Cheever, is a personal memoir. Francis J. Bosha has edited The Critical Response to John Cheever (1994). Samuel Chase Coale provides an overview in John Cheever (1977), while George W. Hunt explores religious dimensions in John Cheever: The Hobgoblin Company of Love (1983). The stories are given close study by James Eugene O’Hara in John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction (1989).
John Cheever was an award-winning novelist and short-story writer who often focused on the lives of New York's middle-class, white, suburban commuters, prompting the critic John Leonard to name him "Our Chekhov of the exurbs." A native of Quincy, Massachusetts, Cheever broke into the literary world when he published a story in The New Republic about his expulsion from the Thayer Academy in Braintree. He moved to New York City in the 1930s and began publishing stories regularly in The New Yorker and other magazines. In 1957 he won the National Book Award for his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, and over the years he wrote several others, including Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1978), and Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1980). Many of the best of his short stories are collected in The Stories of John Cheever (1978).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Though the landscape of Cheever's fiction is usually the wealthy and socially unstable suburbs of New York, manicured neighborhoods where money and even families come and go, he is rarely called a regionalist, as modern southern writers are often categorized. The Swimmer (1964) further complicates our thinking about Cheever, as in it we can see him operating in several modes.
1. Having had several drinks in the Westerhazys' backyard, Merrill decides to go home by swimming through every swimming pool in the county. As he does so, does the story show itself to be a realistic narrative? Surrealistic? Is there something surreal about these suburbs, as Cheever describes them, which would allow The Swimmer to be both realistic and surrealistic?
2. How would you describe the way that the tone of the story evolves, as we move from the opening scene to the closing one, in which Merrill comes "home"?
3. You have probably read other American short stories which comment on a modern, materialistic culture: stories by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salinger, Bellow, Updike, Carver, and many others. In fact, materialism and the superficial, show-off suburbs are commonplace targets. How does Cheever achieve a measure of originality in working with this material?
