Word: cheevers
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...Cheever was an obviously gifted child. His mother took him to Ibsen plays in Boston, and he got nosebleeds out of sheer excitement. He was chubby then and no athlete, but he early discovered his talent for storytelling, and used to gather a crowd of his contemporaries around him on the family veranda on a summer afternoon while he held forth. In his early teens, he sneaked off to Boston, where he hung around that citadel of burlesque, the Old Howard, cadging an occasional pat from the strippers. Cheever's academic career, in which he never took much interest...
...stuff-thousands of Hoiden Caulfields do it every year; as the wounded adolescent swaggers out of the gates of the old academy, he swears that when he gets around to it, he will write up the whole story and restore justice to the shattered universe. Unlike most, young John Cheever actually did write it all down and sent the story to Malcolm Cowley at the New Republic, who promptly printed it. The really astonishing thing about Expelled was not that it was written and actually published, but that there was no self-pity...
...good thing to do. It is bad for everyone." The frustrations seem to have been not much more than the military traditions of the school (named for Sylvanus Thayer, the "father" of West Point), and the fact that the English teachers were running on about Wordsworth and Galsworthy while Cheever was precociously reading Proust and Joyce...
...expulsion left Cheever alone for a long time. He and his brother Fred, older by seven years, took off for Boston in spite of their mother's bewildered tears. There and then, John Cheever, with no prospects in this world, was like
...become a spiritual vagrant-one of that vocal tribe of U.S. intelligentsia whose identifying marks are alienation and a search for identity. Cheever never had any doubt as to his identity. As an economic unit, he was a zero-apparently just a lost boy hanging around Boston. But his brother Fred, who was as convinced as John himself that writing was John's business in life, subsidized him with the midget sums necessary to keep him alive...