On a drizzly and unseasonably cold summer morning, literary exploration begins as Susan Cheever and I depart from her New York apartment, heading towards Ossining in Westchester County. Our destination is the stone-ended Dutch Colonial house where Susan spent her teenage years, still miraculously inhabited by her 90-year-old mother, Mary. Susan, at 65, embarks on this journey with the slightly disheveled air of someone who packed hastily for a long trip; her final stop is Bennington College in Vermont, where she imparts the craft of non-fiction writing. However, this initial air soon dissipates. Scarcely have we left the city limits when I notice a warm, proprietary glow illuminating her face. To my mild surprise, she is relishing our conversation, which revolves entirely around her father, John Cheever, the celebrated American writer. I had anticipated a more somber tone, perhaps even pain.
“Oh, yes,” she affirms, acknowledging my expectation. “I’m somewhat enchanted by my family. I have this peculiar family worship.” She peers intently through the fogged windscreen. “Just wait until you see the house! This beautiful structure that has now become the ugliest place on earth. It’s like the House of Usher.”
Susan Cheever at her New York home. Photograph: New York Times/Redux /eyevine. Alt text: Susan Cheever, daughter of author John Cheever, poses in her New York apartment, reflecting on her father’s literary legacy and complex life.
Of course, Susan is more than prepared for my inquiries. How could she not be? John Cheever passed away in 1982, at the zenith of his career as a bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of five novels and some of the most exceptional short stories ever penned. Yet, in the years following his death, a cascade of revelations about his private life flooded the public sphere, clouding the once pristine waters of his literary legacy with unsettling efficiency. His life has been thoroughly scrutinized. Susan initiated this wave with her memoir, Home Before Dark (1984), intended as a preemptive measure against a potentially damaging unauthorized biography. Her book openly addressed her father’s alcoholism and gently alluded to his bisexuality; she wrote of his late-life affection, of a sort, for a young man she referred to as Rip.
Subsequently, a collection of Cheever’s letters, edited by Susan’s brother, Benjamin, further unveiled layers of complexity. Benjamin wrote in his introduction about the challenging discovery of his father’s homosexuality and coolly thanked composer Ned Rorem for disclosing that “for my father, orgasm was always accompanied by a vision of sunshine, or flowers.” Finally, in 1990, Cheever’s journals, amounting to some 4 million words, were auctioned by the family, with extracts appearing in The New Yorker and later compiled into a single volume.
These journals contain some of Cheever’s most exquisite prose, yet they are profoundly disturbing. The pain, the isolation, the secrecy, the shame: Cheever, a perpetual outsider in his own life, transformed self-loathing into an art form. His public image as the chronicler of suburbia – the “Ovid of Ossining,” as Time magazine dubbed him – suffered a potentially fatal blow. The shadows lurking in his stories took on a new, menacing dimension, while the moments of grace seemed tinged with a sudden hollowness. Was there ever a man whose outward persona so starkly contrasted with his inner turmoil? His friend John Updike certainly thought not, and lamented this psychic abyss, hoping against hope that Cheever’s fiction, with its persistent glimmers of optimism and sense of striving for light, would ultimately endure.
Now, nearly two decades later, comes Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey, who previously chronicled the life of another suburban alcoholic, Richard Yates (an eerie coincidence: before settling in Ossining, the Cheevers rented a house that Yates had once occupied). Bailey’s biography spans almost 700 pages, meticulously detailed to the point where even Cheever’s children have found new revelations within its comprehensive scope. “When I first received the manuscript, it was in electronic form,” Susan recounts. “I’m almost embarrassed to admit that my initial approach was to use the ‘find Susan’ function. That took about an hour. Okay, I thought: nothing too terrible about me. Then I read it from the beginning. It sounds narcissistic, but I found it utterly fascinating. My own memories really only begin when he returned from the war. So, his childhood was entirely new to me. And then, I was unaware of the extent of his gay activity…”
Susan expresses genuine admiration for the book, believing Bailey’s portrayal of her father to be truthful, unflinching, and essentially capturing his complex essence. However, she questions the subdued ending, particularly the chapters covering the last seven years of his life when, against all odds, he achieved sobriety. “For me, the end of his life is triumphant. He quits drinking. He writes what I believe is his finest book [*Falconer*, a novel centered on a drug addict imprisoned for fratricide who engages in a relationship with another inmate]. He finally became the man he was meant to be.”
It is true that Bailey, while a devoted admirer of Cheever’s writing and a compassionate biographer, does not depict this period as unequivocally jubilant; his late-life Cheever remains, in some respects, as confined as his earlier self. But there is a clear reason for this nuanced portrayal. “Rip,” Cheever’s last lover, whose real name is Max Zimmer, cooperated with Bailey on the biography, providing a painfully detailed account of their relationship with the older writer, casting himself as a destitute young man with nowhere else to turn but to his patron’s bed. Max, who hails from a Mormon background and is now married with children, had been Cheever’s student and harbored aspirations of becoming a published writer.
He confided to Bailey that the sexual aspect of their relationship disgusted him. Yet, he implies, he was subtly coerced into it. Moreover, Cheever remained conflicted and secretive about their liaison, often treating Max as little more than a servant in public settings.
Susan, however, disputes this interpretation. She believes her father desired an open life with Max and that they had even discussed the possibility. “Without alcohol, he became his true self,” she asserts. “Had he lived longer, he would have come out. That was the trajectory, and it would have been such a liberating development. He simply couldn’t see how to navigate that without causing pain to others.”
Is she resentful of Max’s account? “Oh, I’m saddened by it. Max was like a brother. He was incredibly kind and supportive after my father’s death. He mentioned to Blake that he was grateful we made room for him in the pew [at Cheever’s funeral]. But he was a pallbearer! Come on! I know what transpired.”
It was Benjamin Cheever who initially suggested to Bailey that he undertake a new biography of his father, unauthorized but completely unimpeded; Ben’s wife, Janet Maslin, a critic at The New York Times, had admired Bailey’s biography of Yates. Susan was initially less enthusiastic – until she had dinner with Bailey, at which point she realized how much her elderly mother might enjoy “an attractive and intelligent man dancing attendance on her.” Bailey became a frequent visitor to Mary Cheever at the house in Ossining, and his book includes a vivid portrait of one of the most complex, and at times, brutal marriages imaginable. “It was quite a European marriage,” Susan remarks, passing me her bag so I can search for toll money. “They were people who didn’t necessarily believe their feelings were sufficient reason to dismantle a family. They certainly inflicted pain on each other, but they didn’t automatically see that as grounds for divorce.”
Did she ever wish, at times, that they would simply separate? In addition to novels and two memoirs about her parents, Susan, who has been married three times, has also authored books addressing her own struggles with alcoholism (she has been sober for two decades) and her tendency towards sexual obsession. From an outsider’s perspective, it’s difficult not to wonder if some of this familial turmoil might have been inherited.
“I’m uncertain whether we all would have been happier if he had left her, or she had left him. When Blake’s book was released [in the US], I was concerned people might call and say, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry [about your childhood].’ But if I’ve found peace with it, they should too. There was a dynamic within our family that wasn’t apparent from the outside. It’s not that we are exceptionally successful or fabulous, but all three of us [she and Benjamin, also a writer, have a younger brother, Federico, known as Fred, a law professor] have navigated life reasonably well. I’ve given considerable thought to what might have been at play. Because we are not, in fact, the walking wounded. Firstly, my father was incredibly funny. Sometimes his humor was quite sharp; you’d be laughing and crying simultaneously. He was utterly unscrupulous in his pursuit of a laugh. But we were all laughing, and there’s something profoundly healing in laughter. My other theory is that there is something deeply therapeutic about reading, and we were constantly immersed in books. Whatever the reasons, I’m grateful for it. I simply found my parents so interesting. I still do. My mother… well, you’re about to meet her. I never know what she will say next, even after all these years.”
John Cheever was born in 1912 in Quincy, Massachusetts, and from childhood, harbored grand aspirations. When his shoe salesman father faced financial hardship and turned to drinking, and his mother, to prevent the family from destitution, opened a gift shop – filled with doilies, china kittens, and Toby jugs – he viewed her venture with profound shame. Hadn’t his father always reminded him to remember he was “a Cheev-?” Apparently, his parents’ predicament had little to do with economic circumstances – the New England shoe and textile industries were in long-term decline – and everything to do with what he perceived as their unique strangeness and vulgarity. Later, when Mary, his well-bred wife, playfully teased him about the family “gift shoppe,” the recollection triggered “an actual sensation of discomfort in [his] scrotum.”
Only his older brother, Frederick, seemed to offer solace: the most “significant relationship in his life,” he once confided to a psychiatrist. Bailey, based on Cheever’s journals and an interview with a confidant, even suggests the relationship might have been incestuous.
Regardless of the nature of their bond, it was Frederick who initially provided financial support when Cheever moved to New York to pursue his writing ambitions, an aspiration he quickly realized. In his early twenties, he began selling stories to The New Yorker, the magazine that would publish his work for the next four decades. Despite this success, he remained desperately impoverished, living in a series of cramped garrets, subsisting on stale bread, raisins, and a daily bottle of milk.
Even after marrying Mary Winternitz, whose father was a renowned surgeon and whose family spent summers at their 50-acre New Hampshire estate, Treetops, complete with a swimming pool and tennis court, his financial struggles persisted. Cheever worried about maintaining Mary in the lifestyle she was accustomed to – a lifestyle he yearned to claim for himself, even as he professed to despise it in his journals.
Gradually, circumstances improved. After Mary and John started a family, they decided to relocate to the suburbs, first to a rented house in Scarborough and then, finally, to the house in Ossining (incidentally, as Benjamin Cheever later points out, Don Draper in the TV series Mad Men, another character grappling with feelings of being an imposter, also resides in Ossining; this cannot be mere coincidence). Cheever adored his new home and boasted about its age (claiming it dated back to the 18th century, though it actually dated from 1928). He also embraced Westchester County. It wasn’t just the opportunity to pose in a Fair Isle sweater with a labrador at his feet and engage in masculine activities like skating, chopping wood, and scything (Cheever was particularly proud of his scything skills). The wooded valleys resonated deeply with him. “We have a nice house with a garden and a place outside for cooking meat, and on summer nights, sitting there with the kids and looking into the front of Christina’s dress as she bends over to salt the steaks, or just gazing at the lights in heaven, I am as thrilled as I am thrilled by more hardy and dangerous pursuits, and I guess this is what is meant by the pain and sweetness of life,” declares the narrator of his story “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.” For Cheever, there was something luminous – even numinous – about life in commuterland. Perhaps he believed it could redeem him.
But, of course, it couldn’t. By the early 1960s, John Cheever could justifiably consider himself a success. He had a beautiful and capable wife (Mary was a teacher and poet) and three children. He possessed his dream home. After years of struggling to write a novel, he had finally published The Wapshot Chronicle, which garnered positive reviews and strong sales. Time magazine featured him on its cover. However, behind this facade of success, all was not well. Cheever was often intoxicated before lunchtime. Consequently, he was largely impotent, at least with Mary. His wife had emotionally withdrawn from him (understandably), and Cheever would fill pages of his diaries lamenting her coldness.
Sometimes, she would give him the silent treatment. At other times, their fights were bitter. Cheever would remind her of the mental illness in her family history. “What about the times you couldn’t get it up?” she would retort. And underlying it all was his intensifying dread of his own homosexual desires. Cheever had already engaged in sexual encounters with at least three men by this point, including the photographer Walker Evans, but in the suburban setting, his shame intensified into a pervasive fear. In his journals, this manifested as homophobia. Cheever frequently expressed his disgust for gay men, whom he considered effeminate, even obscene. The idea of waking up with a man was particularly repulsive to him. “It is one thing to tear off a merry piece behind the barn with the goatherd but one wouldn’t, once your lump is blown, want to take it any further.” After spending a night with the writer Calvin Kentfield, he was so consumed by self-loathing that he temporarily developed agoraphobia.
This cycle of misery continued relentlessly. There is a point while reading Bailey’s book where you might wonder: can I endure another 400 pages in this man’s company? Cheever’s loneliness grew so profound that on his train commute into New York, he would accost strangers with the question: “Wouldn’t you rather talk than read?” By the late 1960s, his drinking was spiraling out of control. His journal entries detail his battles to abstain from gin even until 10 a.m.; he would sneak “scoops” in the pantry as soon as the rest of the family had left the house.
In 1975, Cheever was temporarily exiled to Boston to teach at the university. One day, John Updike arrived at his door to escort him to Symphony Hall. Startlingly, Cheever answered the door completely naked. Cheever would spend time with homeless individuals on park benches, sharing their fortified wine. When a policeman threatened to arrest him, the writer offered a haughty look and drawled, “My name is John Cheever.” He began soliciting male prostitutes. Even rare moments of light were tainted by Cheever’s particularly virulent form of self-hatred. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Cheever met the gay novelist Allan Gurganus. Cheever was infatuated with Gurganus, yet still felt compelled to write of him: “The more he flirts, the more he seems like a woman.”
Finally, however, came the turning point. In 1975, Cheever returned to Ossining, and on April 9th, Mary drove him to the Smithers Alcoholism Treatment and Training Centre in New York (he attempted to jump out of the car en route, but a part of him clearly knew it was necessary). Throughout his treatment, Cheever, an AA skeptic, was by turns ironic and falsely humble; a “classic denier,” according to one of his psychologists. But it worked. He left Smithers on May 7th and never drank again. He was able to resume writing his novel Falconer, and upon its publication in 1977, he was rewarded with a Newsweek cover (headline: “A Great American Novel: John Cheever’s Falconer”). In 1978, the injustice of nearly all his short story collections being out of print was rectified with the publication of The Stories of John Cheever. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for six months, winning the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the American Book Award.
Then there was Max Zimmer, whom he met while teaching in Utah. It’s difficult to articulate the nature of Max’s appeal; a significant part of it seemed to be that he possessed “none of the attributes of a sexual irregular” (in other words, Cheever considered him conventionally masculine; not effeminate). Cheever promised to mentor Max in his writing and encouraged him to leave Utah, suggesting he would help him secure a place at Yaddo, the writers’ colony with which Cheever had strong ties.
Thus began their relationship – of sorts. In Bailey’s book, Max describes one of their early sexual encounters as “just a gruesome thing to have to do.” Cheever never succeeded in getting any of Max’s stories published in The New Yorker or elsewhere, but when he was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 1981, it was often Max who drove him to the hospital for his radiation therapy sessions. In the months leading up to Cheever’s death – Max having divorced his wife and with no other place to go – the house in Ossining became a strange sanctuary. Mary moved Cheever back into their marital bedroom for the first time in years, and Cheever installed Max in the spare bedroom. Mary cooked; Max chopped wood; and Cheever, when physically able, would take Max – or another lover, Tom Smallwood – into the woods for sexual encounters. (Throughout everything, Cheever maintained an astonishing libido.) With sex with men now commonplace, Cheever looked back on his former, tormented self with a degree of amusement. “Nothing could be more natural,” he wrote of his “exertions.” And Mary? He now regarded his marriage with a kind of prayerful wonder. “The word ‘dear’ is what I use: ‘How dear you are.’ It is the sense of moving the best of oneself toward another person. I think this was done most happily within my marriage, although I do remember being expelled to sofas in the living room… I do recall the feeling of moving, rather like an avalanche, toward Mary.” It was an unusual kind of peace, but peace nonetheless.
Susan is correct about the house. From a distance, glimpsed through the rain-soaked foliage, it appears idyllic. But up close, scenes from old, unsettling horror films come to mind. It seems to be decaying gracefully, like a set piece abandoned by a long-forgotten movie production. Upon our arrival, Mary and Ben, who lives nearby in Pleasantville, are waiting for us; hearing the car, they emerge onto the house’s slate steps to greet us. Mother and son are strikingly alike: dark-skinned, long-faced, small and wiry. Mary, in her wide-legged tweed trousers, appears frail – one feels as if she could be crushed in one’s hand, like a potato crisp – and her voice is famously girlish, reminiscent of Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Susan mentions that people used to call the house, hear Mary, and ask: “Is your mother in?”) But appearances can be deceiving. Even as she feigns ignorance about everyday matters, it’s clear she is astute, perceptive, and remarkably resilient. How could she not be? She is Cheever’s widow. I find myself needing to remind myself of this – it seems so improbable – and the thought sends a shiver down my spine.
Inside, almost nothing has changed since Cheever’s death, though there is now a strong odor of cat (Mary has taken in a middle-aged lodger who owns ten cats; “Well, I didn’t know she had ten cats,” she explains). Even his books remain scattered about. The ceilings are low, and the atmosphere is dim; wallpaper peels gently. But Ben and Susan approach this with a lighthearted attitude. It doesn’t seem to depress them. Behind their mother’s back, and sometimes openly, they make exaggerated faces and roll their eyes. They tease, cajole, and argue. Most astonishingly, at least to an outsider, they make no concessions to Mary’s age when it comes to propriety; and she seems to expect none. Never before have I discussed oral sex in front of a 90-year-old woman, let alone the oral sex enjoyed by her husband with another man; and I doubt I ever will again. Here, however, it seems almost commonplace. Certainly, no one notices my blushes. The Cheevers, with gusto and a certain bravery, still seem intent on squeezing every last drop of juice from their father’s life. I am quite taken aback by it all.
Ben, too, admires Bailey’s biography. “He portrays him as a hero, without distorting the quite ghastly facts.” Did he learn anything new from it? “Oh, yes! The facts, the sordid facts and the glorious facts, were already accessible to me. But he’s presented a remarkably accurate picture. When Daddy was alive, he was constantly revising the narrative. We were in a wonderful house! We were in a terrible house! So and so was his friend! So and so was despicable! I was his beloved son! I was a terrible embarrassment! It was incredibly confusing. Blake has managed to chart a course through all of that.”
Was reading it a painful experience? “The truly painful aspect of this process was reading the journals. One of the most hurtful things for all of us is our near-total absence from them. You’re almost relieved when you appear only as a disappointment!”
Cheever constantly criticized Susan about her weight; he desired a petite, delicate daughter and deemed her too greedy. But perhaps Ben endured worse. Cheever would lament in his journal that his elder son was effeminate, and to his face would say, “Speak like a man!” and “You laugh like a woman!” There was a time, Ben recounts, when he began to question whether he was, in fact, gay, and merely acting heterosexual to appease his father. To top it off, it was to Ben that his father came out, just two weeks before his death, in a phone call to Ben’s office at Reader’s Digest. “What I wanted to tell you,” he said bluntly, “is that your father has had his cock sucked by quite a few disreputable characters…”
Does this mean Ben hadn’t, until that moment, understood Max’s relationship with his father? “No, I hadn’t. In fact, I recall Max flirting with me slightly, and I was shocked; I thought Daddy would be horrified if he knew Max was homosexual. But I think actual knowledge follows intellectual knowledge. My father told me that, but I didn’t really… realize it until some time afterward. It was upsetting, but not as upsetting as being screamed at as a young boy for being effeminate. I’ve had to [over the years] reorganize a lot, and to some extent, I’m still engaged in that process. But this [the biography] is a story I can live with. Daddy possessed redeeming qualities. He was so funny.”
Has it been challenging to be Benjamin Cheever? “Yes and no. I was interested in becoming a writer, and I disliked people implying that they expected something better from John Cheever’s son. That was difficult. My first novel was rejected by numerous publishers, and no one could believe it. I’m sure there are many people who confidently believe they would be a far better writer than me if they had my name. Everyone has a father; everyone carries a psychic burden. But I’m also fortunate. In my attempts to understand him, I have access to all these documents, and they are quite well-written, too. You are right to suggest that I’ve had my ups and downs with him, even after his death. Sometimes I’d think: he was a hero! He overcame all these terrible obstacles. But then, at other times, I’d think: what a prick! He’d destroy everything just to get a drink, just to get blown.”
“We all construct our own sense of righteousness, and I strongly believe that, however lonely you are, you don’t sit down next to the first available person on the train and attempt to… you know. This is my second marriage, but it’s lasted 27 years.”
Does he believe Cheever would have shared a home – or attempted to share a home – with Max had he lived longer? “I don’t think Max would have remained that significant, had he lived. He was always a very fickle man. He would have found another boyfriend.”
Throughout this conversation, Mary, who has not read the biography (“I suppose I have to… but there’s nothing about me in it, is there?”), remains mostly silent. Occasionally, however, she interjects. “He was an egotist!” she exclaims when Ben mentions their hurtful absence from Cheever’s journals. When I ask her, she reveals that she always knew, deep down, the essence of her husband. In Bailey’s book, she is quoted as saying: “I sensed that he wasn’t entirely masculine.” To me, she says more humorously: “He was both!” So, what attracted her to him? “His overcoat was too big, and I felt sorry for him.” Was he handsome? “In a way, yes. He was funny. He made me laugh. His flaw was his obsession with class and money. He admired the lives of the wealthy. He desired a good life. That’s what drew him to me. I had a family. He had no family. Only a brother.”
Did she consider leaving him? “Oh, yes. Quite often. But I couldn’t abandon the children, and how would I have supported them?” Did she miss him after he was gone? “Yes! I lived with him my entire adult life. We didn’t always have terrible times.”
“You were very important to him, as someone to adore and someone to despise,” Ben interjects, not softly, but plainly, as if it were self-evident. “I used to tell myself that,” Mary responds. Her mouth is slightly twisted with age, causing her words to emerge from one side in a continuous stream. “His whole life revolved around writing, and I believed in what he was doing, and I wanted to support that. I give myself credit for working at my marriage. More people should try that. I don’t think he would have lived as long [without me]. I kept him alive. I give myself credit for that, too. And now Cheever is read all over the world, in languages I’ve never even heard of. I couldn’t continue living in this house if people weren’t still buying Cheever.”
She is correct about this. Yet, sales are not overwhelming. More than 25 years after his death, The Stories of John Cheever sells only about 5,000 copies annually in the US; Falconer and The Wapshot Chronicle have long struggled to remain in print, although they received a boost earlier this year when the Library of America – the closest America has to an official literary canon – reissued all the novels, along with most of the stories, in two volumes, featuring new introductions by Blake Bailey. (In the UK, coinciding with the British publication of Bailey’s biography, Vintage is re-releasing the stories, novels, journals, and letters with new introductions by, among others, Jay McInerney and Hanif Kureishi). Nor – for reasons that remain unclear – is he widely taught in universities.
How can this be? It is perplexing, especially in the case of his short stories. They are exquisitely beautiful and unique. Cheever possesses all the flair of F. Scott Fitzgerald – an ephemeral quality reminiscent of fine, chilled champagne – but he masterfully blends it with a desolate modernism uniquely his own. “Cheever’s characters are adult, filled with adult darkness, corruption, and confusion,” wrote John Updike in a review of Bailey’s biography, likely written shortly before his own passing. “They are desirous, conflicted, alone, adrift… His errant protagonists move, in their fragile suburban simulacra of paradise, from one island of momentary happiness to the imperilled next.”
But perhaps this interpretation is too bleak. The biography had a somber effect on Updike. After our conversation concludes, Benjamin drops me at the station for my train back to New York. Waiting on the platform, I select a Cheever story that seems particularly fitting, “The Five-Forty-Eight.” The station is tranquil, but the story is anything but. A businessman is confronted on the train, at gunpoint, by his former secretary, Miss Dent. I finish it just as my own train arrives; I close the book precisely as it pulls into the station. And as it does, I recall something Susan mentioned during our drive. “My father is one of those writers who alters your perception,” she told me. “When you look up, the world appears subtly different.”
A Life in Literature: The Essential John Cheever
John Cheever’s prolific 50-year writing career yielded hundreds of short stories and novels, including The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal, Bullet Park, and Falconer. His long and fruitful relationship with The New Yorker resulted in the publication of 121 of his stories. His collected stories dominated The New York Times bestseller list for six months and earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979. Here, Rachel Cooke highlights some essential Cheever works:
The Stories of John Cheever (1978)
If you are to choose only one, let it be this. “A page of good prose remains invincible,” Cheever declared, and this collection is testament to that belief. These are strange, luminous, and often dark stories of suburban life, featuring masterpieces such as “Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” “The Sorrows of Gin,” and “The Five-Forty-Eight.”
The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)
Cheever’s debut novel, an episodic and humorous portrayal of the Wapshot family residing in the New England fishing village of St. Botolph’s.
Falconer (1977)
Considered by some to be Cheever’s magnum opus and his final novel. It narrates the story of Ezekiel Farragut, a university professor and drug addict who, while incarcerated for the murder of his brother, embarks on an affair with a fellow inmate.
The Letters of John Cheever (1988)
Edited by his son, Benjamin, Cheever’s letters offered the first public glimpse into his inner turmoil. They also reveal the competitive anxieties of a writer’s life (correspondents include Saul Bellow and John Updike) and are punctuated with moments of sharp wit.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)
Brutal, melancholic, shocking, and unflinchingly honest: Cheever’s diaries are as captivating – and nearly as lengthy – as those of Samuel Pepys. Did he intend for them to be published? His biographer, Blake Bailey, and his children, who auctioned them after his death, believe that he did.
