The Father Behind the Fiction

The 1978 bestselling publication of The Stories of John Cheever took the U.S. literary world by storm, its huge success defying conventional publishing wisdom while winning its author the money and fame he had long coveted. By then, John Cheever had spent four decades portraying the lives of well-off New Yorkers, via deftly-wrought stories set in Manhattan and later in the bucolic precincts of Westchester and the Hudson Valley. His was a world of cocktail parties around swimming pools, commuter trains tracing the gleaming river, the routines of career and domestic life, all depicted with a mastery of the short-story form that earned him the accolade “Chekhov of the suburbs.” Clocking in at 700 pages and containing no fewer than sixty-one stories, the Big Orange Book, as I always thought of it, conferred on Cheever’s fiction a prominence other short-story writers could only dream of.