Word: cheevers
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...introduction to his collected stories John Cheever recalls a crusty, idiosyncratic editor at The New Yorker. But, adds the author, "since the men he encouraged ranged as widely as Irwin Shaw and Vladimir Nabokov, he seems to have done more good than anything else." Cheever may be the only person in the world who would mention these writers in the same sentence. There are many who would not mention Shaw at all. Alfred Kazin's massive study of American fiction, On Native Grounds, has no room for the author. Edmund Wilson's definitive survey, Classics and Commercials, gives...
...sang a chant of social significance; the tales are filled with laborers and struggling families indistinguishable from Clifford Odets or Arthur Miller characters. But by the '40s he had found his own voice, a Shavian mix of irony and poignance. Since then the supple prose has been, like Cheever's, dominated by sexual themes and by the attempt to lend common experiences and ordinary people a secular grace...
...Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever...
...dogs romp ahead, Cheever acknowledges that he is more accessible, more willing to appear in public than in the past: "I began getting out more when I realized that I'm not only dependent on readers, I rely on their response." He was especially pleased by the mail he received after Falconer was published last year. "A book about a homicidal, fratricidal drug addict," he says, shaking his head. "I got perhaps two crank letters. The rest were thoughtful comments from concerned, well-informed men and women...
...walk describes a long circle and Cheever's house comes into view again. It seems a natural outcropping of the hill on which it was built 179 years ago. In his stories, Cheever has satirized the obsession to collect and preserve old things. "It represents inertia, lack of enthusiasm, everything I detest in life." Then the curator of his own stories laughs outright: "However, if you want to see my grandmother...