John Cheever
Story Stream
Preparing for the Plunge March 25, 2025
JOHN CHEEVER WAS FAR from my mind, or so I thought, on the late-summer weekend a few years ago when a heat wave settled over Los Angeles. The apartment I shared with my then-girlfriend had become a kiln, our ancient window unit no match for the tripl...
The Late-Summer Melancholy of 'The Swimmer' August 26, 2022
The awareness that something good is going to end helps me appreciate that it is happening now. If you appreciate this feeling, as I do, there is no better work of fiction than “The Swimmer,” John Cheever’s 1964 story, which teems with the languid sa...
John Cheever Was the Bard of the Backyard August 20, 2021
Cheever’s spread in Ossining did much to advance his public image as a courtly throwback of a writer—the man who took the bric-a-brac of nice neighborhoods and spun poetry from them....
Cheever's God August 28, 2020
Readers of John Cheever’s stories, most of which appeared in the New Yorker before being collected in a Pulitzer-winning book in 1978, regarded the author as “the Ovid of Ossining,” the artist who showed the riches and wonders of suburban life. Aler...
Vodka for Breakfast: On John Cheever's Journals August 24, 2018
There is something feckless about a writer's journals. They are a specialist's document, and those who parse their pages are like grooming baboons, searching for fleas. Expecting bohemian excess or stoic grace, we discover instead a life reduced to ...
Meaning in the Futility of Existence August 30, 2017
The members of a monthly meet-up in New Orleans look to Sartre and John Cheever to get beyond life's ultimate futility......
Pain of Loneliness and Creative Restlessness January 13, 2017
A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind....
