Word: cheevers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Cheever drank himself right to the edge of the abyss but drew back. In 1975 he quit drinking for good. Chastened and sober, he completed Falconer, a magnificent novel of sin and redemption that hinges on a homosexual relationship. One year later, a collection of his short stories became a best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize. He even made a sort of peace with his sexual appetites...
...Cheever grew up in the Greater Boston shore town of Quincy. His father was a traveling shoe salesman successful enough for a while to keep his family in middling Yankee splendor - a big house, good schools for John and his older brother Fred. But by the mid-1920s, as Cheever reached his teens, the shoe business was tanking, and his father was increasingly drunk and adrift. To make ends meet, his mother opened a gift shop that Cheever would describe as "an abysmal humiliation," at least for him. The big house would be lost anyway; his mother would shed...
...When Cheever flunked out of Thayer Academy at 17, it was the end of his formal education. He promptly fictionalized the experience into a story that was purchased by the New Republic. One year a dropout, the next a published writer - and within a decade, a fixture in the pages of the New Yorker. By the mid-'60s the prizes and (sometimes) money were also rolling in from his first two novels. But by that time, on most mornings he was scuttling to the liquor cabinet right after breakfast to "scoop" the day's first...
...Cheever's troubled nature was his fear of being "a small and dirty fraud," an impostor in his social pretensions and, especially, his sexuality. The suburban squire was just a shopkeeper's son. And though he took a sincere, even intense, sexual interest in women, it was impossible to superintend his wayward libido, which kept pointing him toward...
...time of his death, Cheever's lasting fame seemed the safest of safe bets. But 27 years later, his star has dimmed. Bailey says part of the problem is that Cheever's work hasn't been embraced by academics, the gatekeepers of the canon. It might help that the Library of America, which has its own role in picking the immortals, has just admitted Cheever into its canon. In its new two-volume collection of his work, edited by Bailey, you hear Cheever's sly, lambent voice everywhere. Is it true the professors won't make room for him? Open...