Bio-Historical John Cheever

The main themes of Cheever are the spiritual and emotional emptiness of life. It mainly describes the lives and mores of the middle class in American suburbs during the postwar period, with an ironic humor that softened his dark vision. Cheever's writing is characterized by its apparent simplicity that nevertheless hides a complex vision of human beings. Indeed, classical visions of happiness are facing more or less defects underlying, leading inexorably to the characters in daily dramas. Cheever often contrasts the mainstream of the suburbs with hidden or chaotic emotional states of his characters. His characters are finally forced to face their own shortcomings. One of his most famous stories, The Swimmer (1964), depicts a man who refuses to acknowledge his failures. The protagonist, Ned Merrill, goes home with a swimming pool to another. Cheever often used his family and his life as material for inventing stories. His father owned a shoe factory, is relatively rich until the crisis of 1929 when he abandoned his family. Cheever was deeply upset by the deterioration of relations of his parents. After leaving home, Cheever studied at Thayer Academy, where he was expelled. This experience is the core of his first published story, was expelled (1930), which was bought by The New Republic. Since then, he writes and sells stories to magazines (Alfred, 214).

Cheever was living in Boston, and then moved to New York where he attended writers like John Dos Passos, Edward Estlin Cummings, James Agee and James Farrell. From 1935 he began a lasting collaboration with The New Yorker. During the Second World War, Cheever served four years in the army. After the war he taught and wrote many scripts for television continuously write new ones. In 1930 he moved to a sort of piece of board in New York and started hanging around editorial offices and presenting their work. The fotófrafo Walker Evans, another of his great friends, took a legendary photo of the room, which is now in the Museum of Modern Art. Cheever published some of his first stories in Houl and Horn, Collier's, Story Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, and The Yale Review, until, encouraged by his friends E. Cummings and John Dos Passos, began to move in one of the most important literary circles City: Edmund Wilson, Hart Crane, Katharine White, Kenneth Burke (Harper, 58).

In the mid-1950s, Cheever began writing novels. His novel The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) is strongly autobiographical, based on the relationship of his mother and father, declining his family and his own life. In 1964, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Medal for The Howells Wapshot Scandal (1964), in which he describes some familiar characters from his first novel. From 1956 to 1957, Cheever teaches writing at Barnard College - a job he never liked. However, he is a professor at the University of Iowa and the Sing Prison in the early 1970s, and visiting professor of creative writing at Boston University (1974-75). In Boston, Cheever became depressed due ...