Quicknation    John Cheever

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(May 27, 1912–June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer, sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His i

Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts. His father owned a shoe factory and was relatively wealthy until he lost his business in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and deserted his family. The young Cheever was deeply upset by the breakdown of his parents' relationship. His formal education ended when he was seventeen and left home. Cheever studied at that time at Thayer Academy, but was expelled for smoking. The experience was the nucleus of his first published story, 'Expelled' (1930), which Malcolm Cowley bought for i. Cheever went to live with his brother in Boston. He wrote synopses for MGM and sold stories to various magazines. After a journey in Europe, Cheever returned to the US. He settled in New York and became friends with such writers as John Dos Passos, Edward Estlin Cummings, James Agee, and James Farrell. In 1933 he attended the Yaddo writers' colony in Saratoga Springs.

Cheever died in 1982, at the age of 70, in Ossinning, New York. In 1987, his widow, Mary, signed a contract with a small publisher, Academy Chicago, for the right to publish Cheever's uncollected short stories. The contract led to a long legal battle, and a book of 13 stories by the author, published in 1994. Two of Cheever's children, Susan and Benjamin, become novelists. Cheever's posthumously published letters and journals revealed his guilt-ridden bisexuality. Cheever claimed in his diaries to have been diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) by a marriage counselor that his wife forced him to see. He was also an alcoholic. Cheever's real-life bisexuality was referenced in an episode of i, "The Cheever Letters", in which correspondence from Cheever is discovered, revealing Cheever had an affair with the fictional character of Susan Ross' father.

, and was considered one of the purest examples of "the New Yorker writer". Cheever's main theme was the spiritual and emotional emptiness of life. He especially described the manners and morals of middle-class, suburban America, with an ironic humour which softened his basically dark vision. A number of Cheever's early works were published in i. Its stories had originally appeared in magazines and depicted the life of Upper-Eastside and suburban residents or dealt with Cheever's own experiences as a recruit. He had served during World War II as an infantry gunner and member of the Signal Corps.

After the war he worked as a teacher and wrote s for television. In 1951 Cheever received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to become a full-time writer. His second collection, i (1957) was an autobiographical story based on his mother's and father's relationship, his family's genteel decline, and own life. The book won the National Book Award in 1958. In the 1960s Cheever worked briefly as a Hollywood scripwriter on a film version of D.H. Lawrence's i, published in 1920. From 1956 to 1957 Cheever taught writing at Barnard College - a work he never liked much. However, he was teacher at the University of Iowa and at Sing Sing prison in the early 1970s, and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Boston University (1974-75). i (1978) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award.

Susan Cheever talks about her father, John Cheever, in these audio interviews (1984, 1985, 1991), RealAudio