29 Facts About John Cheever

John William Cheever was an American short story writer and novelist.

John Cheever is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs".

John Cheever's fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born; and Italy, especially Rome.

John Cheever's work has been included in the Library of America.

John William Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, the second child of Frederick Lincoln Cheever and Mary Liley Cheever.

John Cheever's father was a prosperous shoe salesman, and Cheever spent much of his childhood in a large Victorian house, at 123 Winthrop Avenue, in the then-genteel suburb of Wollaston, Massachusetts.

In 1926, John Cheever began attending Thayer Academy, a private day school, but he found the atmosphere stifling and performed poorly, and finally transferred to Quincy High in 1928.

John Cheever's grades continued to be poor and, in March 1930, he was either expelled for smoking or departed of his own accord when the headmaster delivered an ultimatum to the effect that he must either apply himself or leave.

The 18-year-old John Cheever wrote a sardonic account of this experience, titled "Expelled", which was published in The New Republic.

The parents separated, while John Cheever and Fred took an apartment together on Beacon Hill, in Boston.

John Cheever spent the summer of 1934 at Yaddo, which would serve as a second home for much of his life.

John Cheever drove from one place to another in a dilapidated Model A roadster, but had no permanent address.

John Cheever was a daughter of Milton Winternitz, dean of Yale Medical School, and granddaughter of Thomas A Watson, an assistant to Alexander Graham Bell during the invention of the telephone.

John Cheever himself came to despise the book as "embarrassingly immature", and for the rest of his life destroyed every copy he could lay his hands on.

John Cheever's work became longer and more complex, apparently a protest against the "slice of life" fiction typical of The New Yorker in those years.

In 1951, John Cheever wrote "Goodbye, My Brother", after a gloomy summer in Martha's Vineyard.

Largely on the strength of these two stories, John Cheever was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

On May 28,1951, Cheever moved to Beechwood, the suburban estate of Frank A Vanderlip, a banker, in the Westchester hamlet of Scarborough-on-Hudson, where he rented a small cottage on the edge of the estate.

Reviews were mostly positive, though John Cheever's reputation continued to suffer because of his close association with The New Yorker, and he was particularly pained by the general preference for JD Salinger's Nine Stories, published around the same time.

John Cheever was a frequent visitor on the set, and made a cameo appearance in the movie.

John Cheever began an affair with actress Hope Lange in the late 1960s.

On May 12,1973, John Cheever awoke coughing uncontrollably and learned at the hospital that he had almost died from pulmonary edema caused by alcoholism.

The Stories of John Cheever appeared in October 1978, and became one of the most successful collections ever, selling 125,000 copies in hardback and winning universal acclaim.

John Cheever was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts by the MacDowell Colony in 1979.

Variously described as gay, homosexual, or bisexual, John Cheever had relationships with both men and women, including a short relationship with composer Ned Rorem and an affair with actress Hope Lange.

When John Cheever died on June 18,1982, flags in Ossining were lowered to half staff for ten days.

John Cheever is buried at First Parish Cemetery, Norwell, Massachusetts.

The contract led to a long legal battle, eventually resulting in Thirteen Uncollected Stories by John Cheever, published in 1994 by Academy Chicago Publishers.

Also in 2009, John Cheever was featured in Soul of a People: Writing America's Story, a 90-minute documentary about the WPA Writers' Project.