John Cheever

**John William Cheever** (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American short story writer and novelist.

He was born in 1912 in Quincy, Massachusetts. His family had money trouble when he was a teenager. His mother ran a gift shop. He had to leave Thayer Academy because he had bad grades. He wrote a short story about this. It was printed in the _New Republic_ when he was 18.

Cheever did not go to college. He had jobs in a department store and at a newspaper. He moved to New York City in 1934. The writer Malcolm Cowley, whom he met through the _New Republic_, told him to write lots of stories, and he did. Two were printed in _The New Yorker_.

He met Mary Winternitz in 1939, and they married in 1941. After the Pearl Harbor attack, he joined the U. S. Army. He worked for the Signal Corps propaganda unit in New York. While he was in the army, in 1943, his first book was published. It was a short story collection, _The Way Some People Live_.

In 1951 Cheever moved with his wife, daughter, and son to Westchester County outside of New York City. Another son was born in 1957.

Cheever's good work at writing was noticed during his life. He got Guggenheim Fellowships in 1951 and 1960. Stories he wrote won Benjamin Franklin and O. Henry awards. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1957. His first novel, _The Wapshot Chronicle_ won the National Book Award in 1958. _The Wapshot Scandal_ of 1964 won the Howells Medal as the best work of fiction to be published between 1960–1965. _The Stories of John Cheever_ won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1979. He was given the National Medal for Literature in 1982, two months before he died from cancer.

After his death, many memoirs, journals and other writings talked about Cheever's bisexuality, his marriage troubles and alcoholism.

### Novels

- _The Wapshot Chronicle_ (1957)
- _The Wapshot Scandal_ (1964)
- _Bullet Park_ (1969)
- _Falconer_ (1977)
- _Oh What a Paradise It Seems_ (1982)

### Short story collections

- _The Way Some People Live_ (1943)
- _The Enormous Radio and Other Stories_ (1953)
- _The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories_ (1958)
- _Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel_ (1961)
- _The Brigadier and the Golf Widow_ (1964)
- _The World of Apples_ (1973)
- _The Stories of John Cheever_ (1978)
- _Thirteen Uncollected Stories by John Cheever_ (1994)

### Collections

- _The Letters of John Cheever_, edited by Benjamin Cheever (1988)
- _The Journals of John Cheever_ (1991)
- _Collected Stories & Other Writings_ (Library of America) (2009)
- _Complete Novels_ (Library of America) (2009)

## Infobox (writer)

- **name**: John Cheever
- **image**: Johncheever.jpg
- **birth name**: John William Cheever
- **birth place**: Quincy, Massachusetts, U.S.
- **death place**: Ossining (village), New York, Ossining, New York, U.S.
- **period**: 20th century in literature, 20th century
- **genre**: Short story, fiction
- **movement**: Symbolism (arts), Symbolism
- **awards**: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Pulitzer Prize (1979)
National Book Critics Circle Award (1981)
- **years active**: 1935–1982