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Knopf
March 2009
On Sale: March 10, 2009
Featuring: John Cheever
736 pages
ISBN: 1400043948
EAN: 9781400043941
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
From the acclaimed author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates comes the unforgettable life of John Cheever (1912β1982), a man who spent much of his career impersonating a perfect suburban gentleman, the better to become one of the foremost chroniclers of postwar America. βI was born into no true class,β Cheever mused in his journal, βand it was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously.β Written with unprecedented access to essential sourcesβincluding Cheeverβs massive journal, only a fraction of which has ever been publishedβBlake Baileyβs biography reveals the troubled but strangely lovable man behind the disguises, an artist who delighted in the everyday radiance of the world while yearning, above all, βto be illustrious. βCheeverβs was a soul in conflict: he was a proud Yankee who flaunted his lineage while deploring the provincialism of his Quincy, Massachusetts, family circle; a high-school dropout who published his first story at eighteen; a pioneer of suburban realist fiction who continually pushed the boundaries of realism; a dire alcoholic who recovered to write the great novel Falconer; a secret bisexual who struggled with his longings and his fierce homophobia in a revolving door of self-loathing and hedonism. We see a man who concealed his anxieties behind the mask of a genial Westchester squireβa paterfamilias in Brooks Brothers clothes whose world was peopled by legendary writers and beautiful women (Malcolm Cowley, Saul Bellow, William Maxwell, Hope Lange, and John Updike, among them); whose groundbreaking work landed him on the covers of Time and Newsweek; a man whose demons and desperation were never quite vanquished by the joy he found in his work. Blake Bailey has written a luminous biography, a revelation of a writer of timeless fiction and of the man behind the page.
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - March 24, 2009
Diane Rehm Show - NPR - March 10, 2009
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