Book description
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JAY MCINERNEY
John Cheever's letters offer a tantalising glimpse into the life of
a writer. They include correspondence with his contemporaries, such as
Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow, his days as a young,
aspiring writer and his battles with bisexuality and alcoholism. In
this collection, edited by his son Benjamin Cheever, we see how his
private correspondence was as extraordinary as his published works.
John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and he went
to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. He is the author of
seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel,
The
Wapshot Chronicle
, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells
Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in
1978 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer
Prize. Shortly before his death in 1982 he was awarded the National
Medal for Literature.
