Cheever's

I can understand why you wouldn't want to read a long book about Cheever, but can report that Bailey's biography nonetheless makes for fascinating reading ... because, I think, a great deal of Cheever's art is about storytelling itself.

Old heart crying 2009

Another was a review of Cheever's letters and in it Updike had to confront the fact that the man he admired and thought of as a friend despised him and belittled him and his work to other writers.

Old heart crying 2009

The best academic post Yates could manage at the time of his death was at the University of Alabama, while Cheever's late novel (Falconer) was No. 1 on the bestseller list.

O Youth and Beauty! 2009

Because Cheever's stuff isn't really suitable for a high school American Lit class he is becoming more and more obscure.

O Youth and Beauty! 2009

Cheever's plots are improbable, his landscapes are surreal (Re-read the description of the storm and the crashlanding in the corn field in "The Country Husband" and you'll see that Cheever did not paint from life.), and his characters behave in fantastical ways.

O Youth and Beauty! 2009

But I think this is a case of mistaking the people who read Cheever's stories in the New Yorker for the characters in his stories.

O Youth and Beauty! 2009

The three Johns are from entirely different parts of history: John O'Hara's best work was from the 1930s, while John Updike was 20 years younger than Cheever and Updike's work only overlapped the very last part of Cheever's heyday.

O Youth and Beauty! 2009

No Yates book sold more than 10,000 copies (and several significantly below that), while Cheever's 1978 short story collection sold 130,000 copies.

O Youth and Beauty! 2009

Flannery O'Connor was the best of Cheever's hey-day.

O Youth and Beauty! 2009

Comined with Cavett's comments, Cheever's interior life must have been especially stormy and dark.

O Youth and Beauty! 2009