John Cheever's stories rank among the finest achievements of
twentieth-century short fiction. Ensnared by the trappings of affluence,
adrift in the emptiness of American prosperity, his characters find
themselves in the midst of dramas that, however comic, pose profound
questions about conformity and class, pleasure and propriety, and the
conduct and meaning of an individual life. At the same time, the stories
reveal their author to be a master whose prose is at once precise and
sensuous, in which a shrewd eye for social detail is paired with a lyric
sensitivity to the world at large. "The constants that I look for," he
wrote in the preface to The Stories of John Cheever, "are a love of
light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being."
Cheever's superlative gifts as a storyteller are evident even in his
first published work, "Expelled" (1930), which appeared in The New
Republic when he was only 18: "I felt that I was hearing for the first
time the voice of a new generation," said Malcolm Cowley, then an editor
at the magazine.
Moving to Manhattan from his native Massachusetts, Cheever began
publishing stories in The New Yorker in the 1930s, establishing a
crucial if sometimes contentious relationship that would last for much
of his career. His debut collection, The Way Some People Live (1943),
was a book that he effectively disowned, regarding it as apprentice
work; the best stories in the volume, as selected by editor Blake
Bailey, are here restored to print for the first time, offering--along
with seven other stories that Cheever never collected--an intriguing
glimpse into his early development.
By the late 1940s Cheever had come into his own as a writer, achieving a
breakthrough in 1947 with the Kafkaesque tale "The Enormous Radio." It
was soon followed by works of startling fluency and power, such as the
unsettling "Torch Song," with its suggestion of menace and the uncanny,
as well as the searing, beautiful treatment of fraternal conflict,
"Goodbye, My Brother."
Finally, when Cheever and his family moved to Westchester County in the
1950s, he began writing about the disappointments of postwar suburbia in
such definitive classics as "The Sorrows of Gin," "The
Five-Forty-Eight," "The Country Husband," and "The Swimmer."
This volume, published to coincide with Blake Bailey's groundbreaking
biography, is the largest collection of Cheever's stories ever
published, and celebrates his indelible achievement by gathering the
complete Stories of John Cheever (1978), as well as seven stories from
The Way Some People Live and seven additional stories first published
in periodicals between 1930 and 1953. Also included are several short
essays on writers and writing, including a previously unpublished speech
on Saul Bellow.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization
founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by
publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most
significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than
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