Here, for the first time, is the full and unforgettable life of John Cheever (1912-1982), written with unprecedented access to essential sources. Cheever was a soul in conflict, a high-school dropout who published his first story at eighteen, a dire alcoholic who recovered to write the great novel Falconer, a secret bisexual who struggled with his longings and his fierce homophobia, whose groundbreaking work landed him on the covers of Time and Newsweek, a man who believed in the power of family love and sexual pleasure, a man whose desperate loneliness was never wholly offset by his faith in the joy of creation.
Though he was scarcely 5'5", it's hard to imagine another human vessel containing more contradictions than John Cheever, one of the most important American postwar writers. Those conflicts would ultimately render this impish wizard a profoundly unhappy man--and an altogether fascinating biographical subject. And his story here is told by a narrator of unusually subtle gifts. Bailey's book is as lively (and squalid) as his subject but quite dense, an attribute Malcolm Hillgartner overcomes with wondrous pacing and inflection. So in command is he that with the merest pause, he clearly indicates the beginning and ending of quotations or a shift in perspective. And his unfaltering impression of Cheever's Brahmin accent--wholly invented by the writer--rings with acerbity, humor, or pathos. Cheever is very much alive in this reading. M.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
T. C. Boyle, author of The Women...
'The most exquisite, compelling, and heartbreaking life I've yet encountered. Blake Bailey doesn't merely write like an angel, he is an angel—he seamlessly resuscitates the past to make it live and breathe in the present, and he writes with all the power and authority of our finest novelists.'
About the Author
BLAKE BAILEY is the editor of a two-volume edition of Cheever’s work. His last book, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His articles have appeared in Slate, the New York Times, New York Observer, and elsewhere. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.
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