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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 (1912–1982), 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. “I was born into no true class,” Cheever mused in his
journal, “and 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.” Written with unprecedented access to essential
sources—including Cheever’s massive journal, only a fraction
of which has ever been published—Blake Bailey’s 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, “to be illustrious. ”Cheever’s 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 squire—a 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.
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