Remembering a giant

From Today in Literature:
On this day in 1982 John Cheever died at the age of seventy in Ossining, New York. In 1977, the novel Falconer was number one on the best-seller lists and Cheever was on the cover of Newsweek. A year later, Cheever won a Pulitzer for his 700-page retrospective collection, The Stories of John Cheever, a book regarded as an essential chronicle of middle America, written in a style that made its author, said critic John Leonard, "the Chekhov of the suburbs." In his personal life, too, Cheever seemed triumphant: he had finally won his battle with alcoholism and kicked the two-packs-a-day habit; he had also found some accommodation for both his marriage and his bisexuality. In her 1984 memoir, Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever described her father during this period as not so much having arrived as returned: "It wasn't just that he didn't drink anymore... it was like having my old father back, a man whose humor and tenderness I dimly remembered from my childhood."