John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American writer who wrote short stories and novels. He was sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His stories and novels are set in places such as the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages near Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. Some of his short stories include "The Enormous Radio," "Goodbye, My Brother," "The Five-Forty-Eight," "The Country Husband," and "The Swimmer." He also wrote five novels: The Wapshot Chronicle (1958, which won the National Book Award), The Wapshot Scandal (1965, which won the William Dean Howells Medal), Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977), and a novella titled Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982).
Cheever’s stories often explore the two sides of human nature, such as the difference between how a character appears in public and their true feelings, or the conflict between two characters who represent opposite qualities, like light and dark or spirit and flesh. Many of his works also show a longing for a way of life that is disappearing, such as the fictional town of St. Botolphs in his Wapshot novels, which represents strong traditions and close-knit communities, in contrast to the lonely, fast-paced life of modern suburbs.
A collection of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Its first paperback edition also won the 1981 National Book Award.
On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever received the National Medal for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been published in the Library of America.
Early life and education
John William Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, as the second child of Frederick Lincoln Cheever and Mary Liley Cheever. His father worked as a successful shoe salesman, and Cheever lived in a large Victorian house at 123 Winthrop Avenue in Wollaston, Massachusetts, a wealthy neighborhood at the time. In the 1920s, the shoe and textile industries in New England began to decline, and Frederick Cheever lost most of his money. He also started drinking heavily. To help pay bills, Mary Cheever opened a gift shop in downtown Quincy, which John Cheever later described as a very embarrassing experience for the family.
In 1926, Cheever began attending Thayer Academy, a private school, but he found the environment restrictive and struggled academically. He transferred to Quincy High School in 1928. In 1929, he won a short story contest organized by the Boston Herald and was invited back to Thayer Academy as a student on academic probation. However, his grades remained poor, and in March 1930, he was either expelled for smoking or left the school on his own after the headmaster warned him to improve his work or leave. At 18, Cheever wrote a humorous story about this experience called "Expelled," which was later published in The New Republic.
Around this time, Cheever’s older brother, Fred, who had left Dartmouth College in 1926 due to the family’s financial problems, returned to Cheever’s life during a difficult period. In 1932, Frederick Cheever lost the family home on Winthrop Avenue because of a financial failure involving the company Kreuger & Toll. The parents separated, and John and Fred moved into an apartment together on Beacon Hill in Boston. In 1933, John wrote to Elizabeth Ames, who managed the Yaddo artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, saying he had no interest in leaving the city. Ames rejected his first request but offered him a spot the next year. Cheever then decided to end his complicated relationship with his brother. In the summer of 1934, he spent time at Yaddo, which became an important place in his life for many years.
Career
For several years, Cheever lived in different places, including Manhattan, Saratoga, Lake George (where he cared for Yaddo-owned Triuna Island), and Quincy, where he visited his parents who had reconciled and moved to an apartment at 60 Spear Street. He traveled between these places in an old, worn-out Model A roadster but did not have a permanent home. In 1935, Katharine White of The New Yorker purchased Cheever’s story "Buffalo" for $45, marking the first of many stories he would publish in the magazine. Maxim Lieber became his literary agent from 1935 to 1941. In 1938, Cheever began working for the Federal Writers’ Project in Washington, D.C., which he later described as an unimportant and unnecessary job. As an editor for the WPA Guide to New York City, Cheever was responsible for organizing sentences written by people he considered very lazy. He left the job after less than a year and met his future wife, Mary Winternitz, who was seven years younger than him. Mary was the daughter of Milton Winternitz, dean of Yale Medical School, and granddaughter of Thomas A. Watson, who helped Alexander Graham Bell invent the telephone. They married in 1941.
Cheever joined the U.S. Army as an infantryman on May 7, 1942, and later worked for the Signal Corps. His first collection of short stories, The Way Some People Live, was published in 1943 and received mixed reviews. Cheever later disliked the book, calling it "embarrassingly immature," and destroyed every copy he found. However, the book may have helped save his life when it was read by Major Leonard Spigelgass, an MGM executive and Signal Corps officer, who admired Cheever’s "childlike sense of wonder." In the summer of 1942, Cheever was transferred to the former Paramount studio in Astoria, Queens, New York City, and commuted by subway from his apartment in Chelsea, Manhattan. Meanwhile, many of his fellow soldiers were killed during the D-Day invasion in Normandy. Cheever’s daughter, Susan, was born on July 31, 1943.
After the war, Cheever and his family moved to an apartment at 400 East 59th Street, near Sutton Place, Manhattan. For the next five years, he often dressed in his only suit, took the elevator to a basement room, and wrote in his boxer shorts until lunchtime. In 1946, he accepted a $4,800 advance from Random House to continue working on his novel The Holly Tree, which he had paused during the war. "The Enormous Radio," a story about a mysterious radio that broadcasts private conversations, appeared in The New Yorker in May 1947. The story was different from Cheever’s earlier work and impressed the magazine’s editor, Harold Ross, who wrote, "It will turn out to be a memorable one, or I am a fish." Cheever’s son, Benjamin, was born on May 4, 1948.
Cheever’s writing became longer and more complex, possibly as a reaction to the simple, realistic stories typical of The New Yorker at the time. An early version of "The Day the Pig Fell into the Well," a long story with detailed, layered elements, was completed in 1949 but published in The New Yorker five years later. In 1951, Cheever wrote "Goodbye, My Brother" after a difficult summer in Martha’s Vineyard. These two stories, still in manuscript form, helped him earn a Guggenheim Fellowship. On May 28, 1951, Cheever moved to Beechwood, a suburban estate in Scarborough-on-Hudson, Westchester, where he rented a small cottage. The house had previously been occupied by Richard Yates, another writer. In Scarborough, he volunteered with the Briarcliff Manor Fire Department.
Cheever’s second collection, The Enormous Radio, was published in 1953 and received mostly positive reviews. However, his reputation suffered because of his association with The New Yorker, which many critics considered middlebrow. He was also upset that readers preferred J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, published around the same time. Random House asked Cheever to produce a novel or repay his advance, so he contacted Mike Bessie at Harper & Brothers, who bought him out of his contract. In the summer of 1956, Cheever finished The Wapshot Chronicle while vacationing in Friendship, Maine, and received a telegram from William Maxwell: "WELL ROARED LION." Using money from the sale of film rights to "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," Cheever and his family spent the next year in Italy, where his son, Federico, was born on March 9, 1957.
The Wapshot Scandal was published in 1964 and received some of the best reviews of Cheever’s career, despite criticism about the novel’s structure. Cheever appeared on the cover of Time magazine in March 1964 for a profile titled "Ovid in Ossining." In 1961, Cheever moved to a Dutch Colonial farmhouse in Ossining, New York. "The Swimmer," one of his best stories, appeared in The New Yorker in July 1964 but was placed near the end of the issue, behind a story by John Updike, because editors found its surreal style unusual. A film adaptation of "The Swimmer," starring Burt Lancaster, was made in Westport, Connecticut, in 1966, and Cheever visited the set, appearing briefly in the movie.
By the late 1960s, Cheever’s alcoholism had worsened, and he struggled with feelings about his bisexuality. He blamed his marital problems on his wife, Mary, and consulted psychiatrist David C. Hays in 1966 about her behavior. After a joint session, Hays told Cheever that he, not Mary, was the problem, describing him as "a neurotic man, narcissistic, egocentric, friendless, and deeply involved in [his] own defensive illusions." Cheever ended therapy.
Bullet Park was published in 1969 and received a harsh review from Benjamin DeMott in The New York Times Book Review. Cheever’s depression worsened, and he began drinking again in August 1973 after being hospitalized for alcohol-related illness. Despite his health struggles, he taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the fall of 1973, alongside writer Raymond Carver, and his students included T.C. Boyle, Allan Gurganus, and Ron Hansen. As his marriage continued to decline, Cheever’s personal and professional challenges grew.
Personal life
John Cheever's marriage was hurt because he was unfaithful. He had romantic relationships with both men and women, including a brief relationship with composer Ned Rorem and a romantic relationship with actress Hope Lange. His longest romantic relationship was with a student of his, Max Zimmer, who lived in the Cheever family home. Cheever's daughter, Susan, described her parents' marriage as "European," explaining that "they believed their emotions did not have to lead to breaking up the family. They hurt each other a lot, but they did not think that was a reason to get a divorce."
Illness and death
In the summer of 1981, a tumor was found in Cheever's right lung. By late November, he returned to the hospital and learned that the cancer had spread to his femur, pelvis, and bladder. His final novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems, was published in March 1982. On April 27, he received the National Medal for Literature at Carnegie Hall, where colleagues were surprised by his very poor health after months of cancer treatment. In his speech, he said, "A page of good prose remains invincible." John Updike noted that all the literary colleagues present were silent, amazed by his strong belief.
Cheever passed away on June 18, 1982. For ten days, flags in Ossining were lowered to half-staff in his honor. He is buried at First Parish Cemetery in Norwell, Massachusetts.
In 1987, Cheever's wife, Mary, signed an agreement with Academy Chicago Publishers to release his uncollected short stories. This agreement led to a long legal dispute, which resulted in the publication of Thirteen Uncollected Stories by John Cheever in 1994 by Academy Chicago.
Two of Cheever's children, Susan and Benjamin, became writers. Susan's memoir, Home Before Dark (1984), described Cheever's relationships with both women and men. These details were confirmed by letters and journals published after his death. A 1992 episode of the TV sitcom Seinfeld humorously portrayed this by showing a character named Susan discovering explicit love letters from Cheever to her father.
After Blake Bailey wrote a biography of Richard Yates titled A Tragic Honesty (2003), Cheever's son Ben asked Bailey to write an official biography of Cheever. This biography was published by Knopf on March 10, 2009. It won that year's National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography and the Francis Parkman Prize. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
In 2009, Cheever was featured in Soul of a People: Writing America's Story, a 90-minute documentary about the WPA Writers' Project. His life during the 1930s is also discussed in the companion book, Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America.
In 2024, Cheever was portrayed by actor Gary Oldman in the movie Parthenope.