Word: cheevers
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...JOHN CHEEVER, we are told, always loved to tell stories. As an adolescent in the prestigious Thayer Academy, his teacher used to reward the class for their good behavior by having John tell them a story. Later, he told his own children so many legends about his life that they seldom knew what to believe. The fact is, John Cheever glided effortlessly into a world of fiction and, according to his daughter, he sometimes stayed exclusively in his imaginary surroundings for months. Suicidal drinking bouts, long talks with his canine companions, and a career steeped in fictional fantasy tell...
...reality of this writer's beginnings was none too efficacious. Cheever was born the son of a prosperous shoe-merchant and a strong minded Englishwoman, in Wollaston, Massachusetts, in 1912. Bad deals and the depression destroyed his father and left the family dependent on the mother's quaint foreign gift shop. Young John, whose successful older brother Fred had begun at Dartmouth, found himself associating with his embittered, self-pitying father, while his mother grew increasingly distant...
...book's most elucidating portraits is that given of the influential and psychologically loaded relationship that developed between John and Fred Cheever. After Fred graduated college, the two began living together in Boston, with Fred supporting his kid brother until the latter broke the ice as a writer. The attachment conjured up some pretty strong feelings for John, who soon felt compelled to cut the arrangement short. As Cheever later told his daughter, his love for his brother was the most complicated and powerful in his life: "When it became apparent that it was an ungainly closeness, I packed...
...addition to providing choice literary gossip, Home Before Dark is good, though brief, literary criticism. By examining her father's personality, Susan Cheever throws an interesting light on his stylistic preoccupations...
...Susan Cheever her father's life according to his success as a writer. In the early 1960s, when Cheever's first novel. The Wapshot Scandal, began winning awards, and when his reputation as a New Yorker short story staff writer seemed assured, he felt himself on top of the world. But success and celebrity took big toll on Cheever. His daughter claims he became "quite pompous about himself," and his drinking, which had always been heavy according to the socially acceptable fashion of New York literati, became increasingly so. And as Cheever became aware of his homosexuality, his embarrassment over...