John Cheever

At 70 years old, John Cheever physical status not available right now. We will update John Cheever's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer.

He is often described as "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His stories are primarily set in Manhattan's Upper East Side, the Westchester suburbs, and old New England villages based on various South Shore towns, including Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born and Italy, particularly Rome.

"The Enormous Radio," "Goodbye, My Brother," "The Country Husband," and "The Swimmer") were among his short stories, which included "The Wapshot Chronicle (1959), Falcon Park (1977), and a novella Oh What a Paradise (1982). The duality of human nature: often dramatized as a result of a clash between a character's decorous social image and inner decay, as well as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who represent both light and shadow, flesh and spirit.

Many of his books also reflect a longing for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by literary traditions and a strong sense of community, as opposed to modern suburbia's alienating nomadism. The Stories of John Cheever, a collection of his short stories, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and the first paperback version received a 1981 National Book Award.

His work has been included 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 was a successful shoe salesman, and Cheever spent a majority of his childhood in a large Victorian house on 123 Winthrop Avenue in Wollaston, Massachusetts' then-gentel suburb. Frederick Cheever lost the majority of his money in the mid-1920s, but started to drink heavily. Mary Cheever opened a gift shop in downtown Quincy, which was "abysmal humiliation" for the family, as John saw it. Cheever first attended Thayer Academy, a private day school, in 1926, but the atmosphere was stifling and failed, and he then transferred to Quincy High in 1928. He won a short story contest sponsored by the Boston Herald a year ago and was invited back to Thayer as a "unique student" on academic probation. His grades stayed low, but he was also punished for smoking or (more likely) left of his own accord when the headmaster gave an ultimatum stating that he must either apply himself or leave. Cheever, an 18-year-old boy, wrote a sardonic account of this experience titled "Expelled," which was later published in The New Republic. (1930) The great Depression (1930).

Fred, Cheever's older brother who was forced to leave Dartmouth in 1926 due to the family's financial hardships, rejoined Cheever's life "when it was most painful and critical," Cheever later wrote. The Cheever home on Winthrop Avenue was lost to foreclosure after the 1932 fire of Kreuger & Toll, in which Frederick Cheever had invested what was left of his money. The parents separated, but John and Fred shared an apartment on Beacon Hill in Boston. "The idea of leaving the city has never been so distant or desirable," John wrote to Elizabeth Ames, the artist's colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1933. Ames turned down his first appeal but gave him a home the following year, whereupon Cheever decided to break his "ungainly attachment" to his brother. Cheever lived in Yaddo, which would be his second home for a large portion of his life.

Personal life

Cheever's marriage was complicated by his sexuality. Cheever, who has been described as gay, homosexual, or bisexual, had long-term relationships with both male and female, including a brief friendship with composer Ned Rorem and an affair with actress Hope Lange. Max Zimmer, a student of his, who lived in the Cheever family home, was the subject of Cheever's longest affair. Susan, Cheever's daughter, described her parents' union as "European," meaning that "their emotions weren't really a reason to shatter a family." They certainly both hurt each other a lot, but they didn't necessarily see it as a reason for divorce."

Source

Career

Cheever divided his time between Manhattan, Saratoga, Lake George (where he was caretaker of the Yaddo-owned Triuna Island) and Quincy, where he continued to visit his parents, who had reconciled and moved to a 60 Spear Street apartment. In a shabby Model A roadster, the occupant moved from one location to another, but had no permanent address. Katharine White of The New Yorker bought Cheever's book "Buffalo" for $45 in 1935, the first of many Cheever would publish in the magazine. Maxim Lieber was his literary agent from 1935 to 1941. He began working for the Federal Writers' Project in Washington, D. C., which he described as an embarrassing boondoggle. Cheever was charged with (as he put it) "twisting the sentences written by some incredibly lazy bastards" as an editor for the WPA Guide to New York City. He died less than a year, but a few months later, he met Mary Winternitz, his future wife, seven years his junior. She was a granddaughter of Thomas A. Watson, dean of Yale Medical School, and niece of Alexander Graham Bell during the introduction of the telephone. They married in 1941.

On May 7, 1942, Cheever enlisted in the Army. In 1943, his first collection of short stories, The Way Some People Lived, was released to mixed reviews. Cheever used to hate the book as "embarrassingly immature" and, for the remainder of his life, every copy he could lay his hands on was destroyed. However, the book may have saved his life after falling into the custody of Major Leonard Spigelgass, an MGM executive and officer in the Army Signal Corps, who was struck by Cheever's "childlike wonder." Cheever was shifted to Astoria, Queens, New York City, where he commuted via subway from his Chelsea apartment in Manhattan, New York City, early this summer. During the D-Day invasion, the bulk of his old infantry business was killed on a Normandy beach. Susan Gardner, Cheever's daughter, was born on July 31, 1943.

Cheever and his family lived in a 400 East 59th Street apartment building near Sutton Place, Manhattan, for the next five years; almost every morning, he will dress in his only suit and take the elevator to a maid's room, where he stripped to his boxer shorts and wrote until lunchtime. He accepted a $4,800 advance from Random House to begin writing on his book, The Holly Tree, which he had lost during the war. In the May 17, 1947 issue of The New Yorker, a Kafkaesque story about a sinister radio that broadcasts the private conversations of tenants in a New York apartment building was "The Enormous Radio." "It will be a memorable one or I am a fish" prompted a fan letter from Cheever's early, more naturalistic editor, Harold Ross. Benjamin Cheever's son Benjamin was born on May 4, 1948.

Cheever's career grew more complex, notably as a result of a rebuttal of life" fiction that had been typical of The New Yorker in those years. An early draft of "The Pig Fell into the Well"—a long story with intricate Chekhovian nuances that could "operate something like a rondo," as Cheever told his colleague and New Yorker editor William Maxwell, but the magazine didn't have a long page for it until five years later. After a gloomy summer on Martha's Vineyard, Cheever wrote "Goodbye, My Brother" in 1951. Cheever was given a Guggenheim Fellowship largely due to the strength of these two books (still in manuscript at the time). Cheever travelled to Beechwood, the suburban home of Frank A. Vanderlip, a banker, in the Westchester hamlet of Scarborough-on-Hudson, where he rented a small cottage on the estate's edge. Richard Yates, a suburban chronicler, had occupied the house before the Cheevers. He worked in Scarborough as a casual volunteer for the Briarcliff Manor Fire Department.

The Enormous Radio, Cheever's second collection, was released in 1953. Overall, the reviews were mostly positive, although Cheever's reputation was harmed by The New Yorker's close relationship with the literary journal Nine Stories, which were released around the same time. Random House demanded that Cheever either produce a publishable book or pay back his advance, while Harper & Brothers' Mike Bessie ("These old bones are up for auction"), who acquired him out of his Random House deal. While holidaying in Friendship, Maine, Cheever completed The Wapshot Chronicle and received a congratulatory letter from William Maxwell. Cheever and his family spent the following year in Italy, where his son Federico was born on March 9, 1957 ("We wanted to call him Frederick") with the proceeds from the sale of film rights to "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," Cheever and his family spent the following year ("We wanted to say him Frederick" but "there is no K in the alphabet here, and I gave up after an hour or two."

The Wapshot Scandal was published in 1964 and received some of Cheever's most insightful commentary (amid disputes over the novel's episodic structure). Cheever appeared on Time magazine's March 27 issue, this time for an appreciation issue, titled "Ovid in Ossining." (Cheever had moved to a stone-ended Dutch Colonial farmhouse in Ossining on the east bank of the Hudson in 1961.) In the July 18, 1964, issue of The New Yorker, "The Swimmer" appeared. Cheever expressed chagrin that the article (one of his finest) appeared towards the back of the issue, a John Updike story, because Maxwell and other editors of the magazine were a little befuddled by its non-New Yorkerish survivorship. Burt Lancaster's screen adaptation of "The Swimmer" was shot in Westport, Connecticut, in the summer of 1966. Cheever was a regular on the set and made a cameo appearance in the film.

Cheever's alcoholism had been exacerbated by torment over his bisexuality by then. Nevertheless, he blamed the bulk of his marital woes on his wife, and he sought advice from her psychiatrist, David C. Hays, about her hostility and "needless darkness" in 1966. The psychiatrist requested to see the couple together after a long discussion with Mary Cheever; Cheever, who was ecstatic, hopes that his wife's difficult behavior would be addressed later this week. Hays, on the joint session, said (as Cheever wrote in his journal) that Cheever himself was the issue: "a neurotic man, egocentric, friendless, and so deeply embedded in [his] own defense fantasies that [he] created a maletic-depressive wife"; Cheever was soon out of therapy.

Bullet Park was released in 1969 and received a scathing review from Benjamin DeMott on The New York Times Book Review's front page: "John Cheever's short stories are and will remain lovely birds." No birds sing in Bullet Park's tense atmosphere. Cheever's alcohol withdrawal swelled, and he restarted psychotherapy in May (which was also fruitless). In the late 1960s, he began an affair with actress Hope Lange.

On May 12, 1973, Cheever awakened coughing uncontrollably and discovered at the hospital that he had almost died from pulmonary edema exacerbated by alcoholism. He returned home after a month in the hospital, pledging never to drink again; however, he recommenced drinking in August. Despite his precarious health, he spent the fall semester teaching (and drinking, with fellow writer-teacher Raymond Carver) at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where his students included T. C. Boyle, Allan Gurganus, and Ron Hansen. Cheever's marriage continued to decline and moved into a fourth-floor walk-up apartment at 71 Bay State Road. Cheever's drinking soon became suicidal, and Fred, his brother Fred, who is now practically indigent but sober after his own lifelong bout with alcoholism, led John back to Ossining in March 1975. Cheever was admitted to the Smithers Alcoholic Rehabilitation Unit in New York on April 9, where he shared a bedroom and bath with four other men. On May 7, Cheever never drank alcohol again, and his wife was driven home by his wife.

Cheever appeared on Newsweek's front page in March 1977 with the headline, "A Great American Novel: John Cheever's Falconer." There was no. 1 on the novel. For three weeks, No. 1 has been on the New York Times Best Seller list. The Stories of John Cheever began in October 1978 and became one of the most influential collections ever, selling 125,000 copies in hardback and winning universal recognition.

In 1979, Cheever was given the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts by the MacDowell Colony.

Source