John Cheever
Based on Wikipedia: John Cheever
In the basement of an apartment building on East 59th Street in Manhattan, a man in his boxer shorts sat typing every morning for five years. He had taken the elevator down in his only suit, stripped to his underwear in a tiny maid's room, and written until lunch. This was John Cheever's routine in the late 1940s—and somehow, from that absurd arrangement, emerged some of the finest American short stories ever written.
Cheever has been called "the Chekhov of the suburbs," a nickname that captures something essential about his work. Anton Chekhov, the Russian master, wrote stories about the quiet desperation of provincial life in 19th-century Russia. Cheever did something similar for mid-20th-century America, but his provinces were the commuter towns of Westchester County, the Upper East Side cocktail parties, and the leafy subdivisions where the American Dream was supposedly being lived.
What made Cheever remarkable wasn't just his settings. It was his ability to find the darkness beneath the manicured lawns.
A Fall from Grace in Quincy
John William Cheever was born on May 27, 1912, in Quincy, Massachusetts, a town just south of Boston. His father, Frederick, was a prosperous shoe salesman, and young John grew up in a large Victorian house in the genteel suburb of Wollaston. It was exactly the kind of comfortable, respectable upbringing that Cheever would later dissect in his fiction.
Then everything collapsed.
In the mid-1920s, the New England shoe and textile industries began their long decline. Frederick Cheever lost most of his money and turned to drink. To keep the family afloat, John's mother opened a gift shop in downtown Quincy—a development that mortified her teenage son. He called it an "abysmal humiliation." This sense of fallen gentility, of surfaces cracking to reveal messier truths beneath, would become one of the defining themes of his work.
School didn't go well either. Cheever attended Thayer Academy, a private day school, but found it stifling. His grades were poor. He transferred to the public high school, won a short story contest, got invited back to Thayer on probation, and promptly continued to fail. In March 1930, at eighteen years old, he was either expelled for smoking or simply walked out when the headmaster gave him an ultimatum.
His response was to write about it. "Expelled," a sardonic account of his departure from Thayer, was published in The New Republic. It was his first significant publication, and it established a pattern that would define his career: transforming personal pain into polished prose.
The Wandering Years
The early 1930s were desperate times for the Cheever family. The 1932 crash of Kreuger & Toll—a Swedish financial empire whose collapse was one of the largest frauds in history up to that point—wiped out what remained of Frederick Cheever's savings. The family lost their house to foreclosure. John's parents separated.
John and his older brother Fred took an apartment together on Beacon Hill in Boston. It was an intense, complicated relationship. Fred had been forced to withdraw from Dartmouth during the family's financial crisis and re-entered John's life "when the situation was most painful and critical," as Cheever later wrote. The brothers' bond—its closeness and its tensions—would echo through Cheever's fiction, where brothers often appear as opposing forces, embodying light and dark, flesh and spirit.
In 1934, Cheever discovered Yaddo, the famous artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. It would become a second home for much of his life. Between Yaddo visits, he drifted: Manhattan, Lake George (where he worked as a caretaker), back to Quincy to see his reconciled parents. He drove between these places in a falling-apart Model A roadster, with no permanent address to call his own.
Then, in 1935, came the breakthrough that mattered. Katharine White of The New Yorker bought his story "Buffalo" for forty-five dollars.
Forty-five dollars doesn't sound like much. But The New Yorker was already the most prestigious magazine for short fiction in America, and this sale began a relationship that would last for decades. Cheever would publish more stories in The New Yorker than almost any other writer in the magazine's history.
War, Marriage, and the Basement
In 1938, Cheever took a job with the Federal Writers' Project in Washington, D.C.—part of the Works Progress Administration, the massive New Deal program that employed millions during the Great Depression. He worked as an editor on the WPA Guide to New York City, which he found embarrassing. His job, as he put it, was "twisting into order the sentences written by some incredibly lazy bastards." He quit after less than a year.
Shortly after, he met Mary Winternitz, seven years his junior. She came from an impressive family: her father was the dean of Yale Medical School, and her grandfather was Thomas A. Watson, Alexander Graham Bell's assistant during the invention of the telephone. They married in 1941.
The following year, Cheever enlisted in the Army as an infantryman. His first short story collection, The Way Some People Live, was published in 1943 to mixed reviews. Cheever came to hate the book, calling it "embarrassingly immature." For the rest of his life, he destroyed every copy he could find.
But that embarrassing book may have saved his life.
It fell into the hands of Major Leonard Spigelgass, an MGM executive serving in the Signal Corps, who was struck by what he called Cheever's "childlike sense of wonder." Spigelgass arranged for Cheever to be transferred to a film unit at the old Paramount studio in Queens. He commuted to work by subway from Chelsea. Meanwhile, most of his original infantry company was killed on a Normandy beach during the D-Day invasion.
After the war came the basement years. The Cheevers moved to an apartment near Sutton Place, and every morning John would put on his only suit, take the elevator to a maid's room in the basement, strip to his boxer shorts, and write until lunch. It was in this unlikely setting that he produced "The Enormous Radio," the story that announced his mature voice.
The Enormous Radio and What It Revealed
Published in The New Yorker in May 1947, "The Enormous Radio" is about a sinister radio that broadcasts the private conversations of tenants in a New York apartment building. A couple acquires this radio and becomes obsessed with eavesdropping on their neighbors—their fights, their secrets, their petty cruelties. Eventually, of course, their own secrets come spilling out.
It's a Kafkaesque premise. Franz Kafka, the Czech writer who died in 1924, was famous for stories in which ordinary life suddenly becomes strange and nightmarish—a man wakes up transformed into a giant insect, a court convicts people without ever revealing the charges. Cheever was doing something similar, but his nightmare wasn't absurdist bureaucracy. It was the fear that the respectable surface of American life was a thin membrane, and that something shameful lurked beneath every polished exterior.
Harold Ross, The New Yorker's famously irascible editor, sent Cheever a fan letter: "It will turn out to be a memorable one, or I am a fish."
Ross was not a fish. "The Enormous Radio" became one of the most anthologized American short stories of the 20th century.
The Suburbs and Their Discontents
In 1951, Cheever moved his family to Scarborough-on-Hudson, a Westchester County hamlet about thirty miles north of Manhattan. They rented a small cottage on the edge of Beechwood, the suburban estate of a banker named Frank A. Vanderlip. In a coincidence that feels almost too perfect, the cottage had previously been occupied by Richard Yates, another chronicler of suburban disappointment whose novel Revolutionary Road would later become a classic of the genre.
This was Cheever's world now: the commuter trains, the cocktail parties, the swim clubs, the station wagons. He joined the local volunteer fire department. He wrote stories about men who took the 5:48 train home and the anxieties they nursed beneath their gray flannel suits.
His second collection, The Enormous Radio and Other Stories, appeared in 1953. Reviews were mostly positive, but Cheever chafed at being associated too closely with The New Yorker, which some critics considered middlebrow. It particularly stung that J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, published around the same time, received more attention.
Cheever also had a novel problem—literally. Random House had given him an advance for a novel called The Holly Tree, which he'd been unable to finish. The publisher demanded he either produce a book or pay back the money. A friend at Harper & Brothers bought him out of the contract, and in the summer of 1956, while vacationing in Friendship, Maine, Cheever finally completed The Wapshot Chronicle.
The novel won the National Book Award in 1958. It's a sprawling, episodic story about a declining New England family, set in a fictional town called St. Botolphs. The name evokes an older, more rooted America—a place with abiding traditions and a sense of community that the alienating suburbs seemed to lack.
The Swimmer in the Backyard Pools
By the early 1960s, Cheever was famous. In 1961, he moved to a stately Dutch Colonial farmhouse in Ossining, New York, on the east bank of the Hudson River. The Wapshot Scandal appeared in 1964 to strong reviews, and that March, Cheever appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The profile was titled "Ovid in Ossining"—a reference to the ancient Roman poet who wrote about transformation and exile.
That same year, The New Yorker published "The Swimmer," which may be Cheever's masterpiece.
The premise is deceptively simple. A man named Neddy Merrill decides to swim home across his county by way of the backyard pools in his wealthy suburb. He starts on a bright summer afternoon, and at first the journey is a kind of triumph—neighbors greet him, offer him drinks, admire his athletic form. But as he progresses from pool to pool, something strange happens. The season seems to shift. The welcomes grow colder. By the end, he arrives at his own house to find it empty and abandoned.
What happened? The story never quite explains. Is it an allegory of aging? Of financial ruin? Of the way denial can compress years of decline into what feels like a single afternoon? Readers have debated the meaning for sixty years. The editors at The New Yorker were a bit bewildered by its non-New Yorkerish surrealism and buried it toward the back of the issue, behind a John Updike story. Cheever noted this with chagrin.
In 1968, the story was adapted into a film starring Burt Lancaster. Cheever visited the set in Westport, Connecticut, and made a cameo appearance.
The Darkness Below
By the time "The Swimmer" was being filmed, Cheever's alcoholism had become severe. He was drinking heavily, his marriage was strained, and he was tormented by his bisexuality—which he had acted on but never publicly acknowledged, in an era when such acknowledgment could destroy a career and a family.
In 1966, he consulted a psychiatrist about his wife's "hostility" and "needless darkness." When the psychiatrist met with Mary Cheever, he requested a joint session. Cheever was hopeful—finally, he thought, his wife's difficult behavior would be addressed.
Instead, the psychiatrist told him that he himself was the problem: "a neurotic man, narcissistic, egocentric, friendless, and so deeply involved in [his] own defensive illusions that [he has] invented a manic-depressive wife."
Cheever terminated therapy.
His 1969 novel, Bullet Park, received a devastating front-page review in The New York Times Book Review. The critic Benjamin DeMott wrote: "John Cheever's short stories are and will remain lovely birds... But in the gluey atmosphere of Bullet Park no birds sing." Cheever's depression deepened. He began an affair with the actress Hope Lange. He kept drinking.
Near Death and Recovery
On May 12, 1973, Cheever awoke coughing uncontrollably. At the hospital, he learned he had nearly died from pulmonary edema—fluid in the lungs—caused by alcoholism. He spent a month recovering and vowed never to drink again.
He resumed drinking in August.
That fall, despite his health, he taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, one of the most prestigious creative writing programs in the country. His students included T. Coraghessan Boyle, Allan Gurganus, and Ron Hansen—all of whom would become accomplished writers. He also drank heavily with a fellow teacher: Raymond Carver, another master of the American short story who was fighting his own battle with alcoholism.
Cheever's marriage continued to deteriorate. He took a teaching position at Boston University and moved into a cramped fourth-floor walkup. His drinking became, in his word, "suicidal."
In March 1975, his brother Fred—who had struggled with alcoholism his entire life but was now sober and nearly broke—drove John back to Ossining. In April, Cheever checked into the Smithers Alcoholic Rehabilitation Unit in New York, where he shared a bedroom and bathroom with four other men.
His wife drove him home on May 7, 1975. He never drank alcohol again.
Late Triumph
Sobriety brought a remarkable late flowering. In March 1977, Cheever appeared on the cover of Newsweek with the headline "A Great American Novel: John Cheever's Falconer." The novel—about a drug-addicted professor imprisoned for murdering his brother—reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
The following year, The Stories of John Cheever was published. It collected sixty-one stories spanning his career, and it became one of the most successful short story collections in American publishing history, selling 125,000 hardcover copies. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and, when the paperback edition came out, another National Book Award.
In 1979, the MacDowell Colony awarded Cheever its Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts.
The Final Chapter
In the summer of 1981, doctors discovered a tumor in Cheever's right lung. By late November, the cancer had spread to his femur, pelvis, and bladder. He was dying.
His final novella, Oh What a Paradise It Seems, was published in March 1982. On April 27, he traveled to Carnegie Hall to receive the National Medal for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His colleagues were shocked by his appearance—months of cancer treatment had ravaged him. But he stood and delivered his remarks.
"A page of good prose," he declared, "remains invincible."
John Updike, who was present, wrote that "all the literary acolytes assembled there fell quite silent, astonished by such faith."
Cheever died on June 18, 1982, six weeks after receiving the medal. He was seventy years old. In Ossining, flags were lowered to half-staff for ten days. He is buried at First Parish Cemetery in Norwell, Massachusetts, not far from where he grew up.
The Man Behind the Stories
After Cheever's death, the carefully maintained surfaces of his life began to crack—just like the surfaces in his fiction.
In 1984, his daughter Susan published Home Before Dark, a memoir that revealed her father's sexual relationships with both women and men. His published letters and journals confirmed this. Cheever had conducted affairs throughout his marriage, including a short relationship with the composer Ned Rorem, a long affair with Hope Lange, and his longest relationship of all—with a student named Max Zimmer, who lived in the Cheever family home.
Susan Cheever described her parents' marriage as "European": "They were people who felt their feelings weren't necessarily a reason to shatter a family. They certainly hurt each other plenty but they didn't necessarily see that as a reason for divorce."
Both Susan and her brother Benjamin became writers. The family's literary legacy continued, even as its secrets came to light.
The Duality He Wrote About
Looking back at Cheever's life, it's impossible not to notice how closely he lived the themes he wrote about. The duality of human nature—"the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption," as critics have described his work—was his own daily experience. He was the respectable suburban family man who wrote in his boxer shorts, the acclaimed author fighting suicidal alcoholism, the husband and father conducting affairs with men and women.
His fiction often features brothers who embody opposing qualities: light and dark, flesh and spirit. Cheever himself had that complicated bond with his brother Fred—the two of them clinging together through the family's collapse, John eventually severing what he called his "ungainly attachment," Fred saving John's life decades later by driving him to rehab.
And then there's the nostalgia that runs through his work—the longing for a vanishing way of life, the mythical St. Botolphs of the Wapshot novels, where traditions held and communities endured. Cheever grew up in just such a world, in a Victorian house in a genteel suburb, before it all fell apart. He spent the rest of his life writing about people living in the aftermath of such losses, maintaining appearances while the ground shifted beneath them.
"The Swimmer" ends with Neddy Merrill standing in the rain before his dark, abandoned house, confused about how he got there. It's an image of American life that Cheever understood from the inside: the long journey home, the dawning awareness that something has gone terribly wrong, and the locked door at the end.
His work endures because he told that story better than almost anyone. A page of good prose, as he said at the end, remains invincible.