Cheever: A Life

by Blake Bailey (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2010

  $26.00

• Used

  Hardcover
  2009

  $18.12

  John Cheever was one of the foremost chroniclers of post-war America, a peerless writer who on his death in 1982 left not only some of the best short stories of the twentieth century and a number of highly acclaimed novels, but also a private journal that runs to an astonishing four million words.

  Cheever's was a soul in conflictm who hid his troubles - alcoholism, secret bisexuality - behind the screen of genial life in suburbia, but as John Updike came to remark: `Only he saw in its cocktail parties and swimming pools the shimmer of dissolving dreams . . .'

  Blake Bailey, writing with unprecedented access to the journal and other sources, has brought characteristic eloquence and sensitivity to his interpretation of Cheever's life and work. This is a luminous biography that reveals - behind the disguises with which he faced the world - a troubled but strangely lovable man, and a writer of timeless fiction.

  `Stunningly detailed . . . Even more eloquent and resourceful than Bailey's celebrated biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty . . . Bailey's interweaving of Cheever's fiction with his experience is a tour de force' New York Times Book Review