John Cheever

After the war, Cheever moved his family to an apartment building at 400 East 59th Street, near Sutton Place, Manhattan; almost every morning for the next five years, he would dress in his only suit and take the elevator to a maid's room in the basement, where he stripped to his boxer shorts and wrote until lunchtime. Read Less

His work has been included in the Library of America.

John William Cheever was the second child of Frederick Lincoln Cheever and Mary Liley Cheever. His father was a prosperous shoe salesman and Cheever spent much of his childhood in a large Victorian house, at 123 Winthrop Avenue, in the genteel suburb of Wollaston, Massachusetts. In the mid-1920s, however, as the New England shoe and textile industries began their long decline, Frederick Cheever lost most of his money and began to drink heavily. To pay the bills, Mary Cheever opened a gift shop in downtown Quincy—an "abysmal humiliation" for the family, as John saw it. Read Less

The flags in Ossining were lowered to half mast for 10 days after Cheever's death.

In 1987, Cheever's widow, Mary, signed a contract with a small publisher, Academy Chicago, for the right to publish Cheever's uncollected short stories. The contract led to a long legal battle and a book of 13 stories by the author, published in 1994. Two of Cheever's children, Susan and Benjamin, became writers. Susan Cheever's memoir, Home Before Dark (1984), revealed Cheever's bisexuality, which was confirmed by his posthumously published letters and journals. This was parodied to comedic effect in an episode of the TV sitcom Seinfeld in 1992, when one of the characters, Susan, discovers explicit love letters from Cheever to her father.

After Blake Bailey published his biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty (2003), Cheever's son Ben suggested he write an authoritative biography of Cheever. The book was published by Knopf on March 10, 2009, and won that year's National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, the Francis Parkman Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Read Less