Cheever by blake bailey7/7/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() He sold his first story at the age of 18.Īfter that early breakthrough, his 20s proved more of a struggle. Never a sporty child, John turned to writing to give "fitness and shape" to the unhappiness at home. Meanwhile his father became a miserable drunk. His mother opened a gift shop to keep the family afloat, but to John, a precocious snob, the vulgarity of that was hard to forgive. ![]() As to biography, few writers' lives have been so painstakingly documented: he did it himself, in his incomparable journals his daughter Susan and son Ben have written extensively about him and now comes this 800-page biography.Ĭheever grew up in a world of elegance and finery (an 11-bedroom 19th-century house, black-tie dances, a Buick sedan) but when his father's lucrative shoe business collapsed, things fell apart. He'd a strong sense of where he was going, too – Mount Parnassus, or the American fiction writer's equivalent. He knew exactly where he came from – an old and illustrious Yankee family, with a weakness for drink and profligacy. ![]() "I came from nowhere and I don't know where I'm going." Like many of his claims, it's one to be treated with suspicion. "I have no biography," John Cheever once wrote. ![]()
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