Wednesday, June 18, 2008

A grand master of the short story

John Cheever at Home
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
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