John Cheever

Cheever, having started drinking as a youngster, finally stopped in 1975, on Page 518. Watching the years unroll via page headings throughout Bailey’s “Cheever,” this reader reached Page 79, the year 1935, and realized with panic that I was to be pent up with a depressive drunk for 40 more years. Boo-hoo for me: think of Cheever’s wife, sons and daughter! --Geoffrey Wolff, Suburban Suffering , The New York Times, March 16, 2009, review of Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey


There’s his decades-long struggle to fashion a novel (The Wapshot Chronicle) and free himself from the stigma of being “just” a story writer; eventually, he “loses” that battle at the height of his fame in 1979, by winning the Pulitzer Prize for the omnibus collection The Stories Of John Cheever. ... At his core, Cheever was a self-centered man who didn’t like himself, a conundrum that could never be resolved. So he wrote. --Gregg LaGambina, A.V. Club, March 19, 2009, review of Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey

Subtle and well observed, they followed ordinary members of the suburban middle-class. They all drank too much, the Cabots and the Westerhazys, the Grahams and the Howlands. They were unnerved by how old they were, how boring things could be, how tired they were of their marriages. They were conscious of social codes and proper attire, and rarely said anything profound. --The Economist, Buttoned up, March 12, 2009, review of Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey

Cheever was a puzzle of a man, fraught with contradictions and inconsistencies that, thankfully for American literature, evolved into luminous prose. His alcoholism and bisexuality are now well known, but not so the humanizing details, or his depression and cancer... --Joanna Brichetto, A Cheever chronicle, Book Page, March 2009, review of Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey

Cheever’s novels, like his journals, belong to his lewdness and his pain, and it is easy to see why they have never been as popular as his stories. They are blunter instruments than the polished scalpels of his short fiction; they can be sloppy, challenging, even inscrutable, but they hit the reader with great force. In his stories, Cheever tried to make sense of the world and of other people; in his novels, he mostly tried to make sense of himself. --Stefan Beck, Cheever vs. Cheever, The New Criterion, March 2009, review of Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey

Authors' Calendar, by Petri Liukkonen (2008)

Reunions: The New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman talks with Richard Ford, who reads a favorite John Cheever short story, The New Yorker, December 25, 2006

John Cheever: Parody and The Suburban Aesthetic, by John Dyer

The Cheever Letters, by Larry David, Elaine Pope, and Tom Leopold, Seinfeld, October 28, 1992