John Cheever

John William Cheever (born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912; died in Ossining, New York, in 1982) was an American writer of short stories and novels, often called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." He wrote in English about the comfortable middle class of New York and New England. He matters because he turned the short story into a faithful, unsettling mirror of postwar domestic life in America.

Cheever grew up in a family that knew prosperity and then ruin. His father, a shoe salesman, lost much of his fortune in the mid-1920s, when the New England shoe and textile trades began their long decline, and his mother opened a gift shop to keep the household afloat. Cheever was expelled from Thayer Academy, according to the version most often repeated, for smoking; that episode became the basis of his first published story, "Expelled." During the 1930s he devoted himself to fiction, and his stories found their way into The New Yorker, a relationship that lasted until his death. His first collection, The Way Some People Live (1943), got mixed reviews, and he later came to despise it and destroyed the copies he could find.

His mature work arrived with stories such as "The Enormous Radio" and "The Swimmer," in which ordinary life tilts into something strange, half detailed and half symbolic. Recurring themes include the gap between social appearance and inner corruption, loneliness, alcoholism, homosexuality, failed relationships and a nostalgia for a community that is fading away. In his novels, the Wapshot family saga evokes the mythical village of St. Botolphs, while Bullet Park and Falconer look more starkly at violence and guilt. In 1979 he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Stories of John Cheever.

His legacy lies in the American short story, which owes much to his attentive view of suburban life. His letters and journals, published after his death, have helped readers understand both his work and the tensions behind it.