John Cheever's Books

The Journals of John Cheever

By: John Cheever

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In these journals, the experiences of one of the most renowned twentieth-century American writers come to life with fascinating, wholly revealing detail. • "A treasure-trove of riches." —The New York Times Book Review The Pulitzer Prize-winning author's journals provide peerless insights into the creation of his novels and stories. But they are equally the record of a complex, often dark, always closely observed inner world. No American writer of comparable stature has left such an unreservedly revealing and moving account of himself: his family life, his literary life, and his emotional life. The final word from one of modern America's great writers, The Journals of John Cheever provides a powerful and beautiful capstone to a towering oeuvre.

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418

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Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307790290

ISBN 13

9780307790293

The Letters of John Cheever

By: John Cheever

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The Letters of John Cheever

By: John Cheever

John Cheever, novelist, short-story writer, and winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, was a prolific writer of letters, sending as many as thirty in a week. These letters, culled from thousands written to famous writers and celebrities - including John Updike, Josephine Herbst, William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, Hope Lange and Philip Roth - his family, friends, and lovers, paint an intimate and surprising self-portrait that is as vivid as any character Cheever invented. Edited and annotated by his son Benjamin, Cheever's letters trace his development as a writer and as a man. They reveal him to be complex, flawed, and full of contradictions. On display are not just his ambitions and weaknesses, his alcoholism and his cloaked bisexuality, but also the evolution of his wit and style and, most of all, his love of life.

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Simon and Schuster

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ISBN 10

1439164649

ISBN 13

9781439164648

John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings (LOA #188)

By: John Cheever

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John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings (LOA #188)

By: John Cheever

John Cheever’s stories rank among the finest achievements of twentieth-century short fiction. Ensnared by the trappings of affluence, adrift in the emptiness of American prosperity, his characters find themselves in the midst of dramas that, however comic, pose profound questions about conformity and class, pleasure and propriety, and the conduct and meaning of an individual life. At the same time, the stories reveal their author to be a master whose prose is at once precise and sensuous, in which a shrewd eye for social detail is paired with a lyric sensitivity to the world at large. “The constants that I look for,” he wrote in the preface to The Stories of John Cheever, “are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.” Cheever’s superlative gifts as a storyteller are evident even in his first published work, “Expelled” (1930), which appeared in The New Republic when he was only 18: “I felt that I was hearing for the first time the voice of a new generation,” said Malcolm Cowley, then an editor at the magazine. Moving to Manhattan from his native Massachusetts, Cheever began publishing stories in The New Yorker in the 1930s, establishing a crucial if sometimes contentious relationship that would last for much of his career. His debut collection, The Way Some People Live (1943), was a book that he effectively disowned, regarding it as apprentice work; the best stories in the volume, as selected by editor Blake Bailey, are here restored to print for the first time, offering—along with seven other stories that Cheever never collected—an intriguing glimpse into his early development. By the late 1940s Cheever had come into his own as a writer, achieving a breakthrough in 1947 with the Kafkaesque tale “The Enormous Radio.” It was soon followed by works of startling fluency and power, such as the unsettling “Torch Song,” with its suggestion of menace and the uncanny, as well as the searing, beautiful treatment of fraternal conflict, “Goodbye, My Brother.” Finally, when Cheever and his family moved to Westchester County in the 1950s, he began writing about the disappointments of postwar suburbia in such definitive classics as “The Sorrows of Gin,” “The Five-Forty-Eight,” “The Country Husband,” and “The Swimmer.” This volume, published to coincide with Blake Bailey’s groundbreaking biography, is the largest collection of Cheever’s stories ever published, and celebrates his indelible achievement by gathering the complete Stories of John Cheever (1978), as well as seven stories from The Way Some People Live and seven additional stories first published in periodicals between 1930 and 1953. Also included are several short essays on writers and writing, including a previously unpublished speech on Saul Bellow. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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National Geographic Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1598530348

ISBN 13

9781598530346

John Cheever: Complete Novels (LOA #189)

The Wapshot Chronicle / The Wapshot Scandal / Bullet Park / Falconer / Oh What a Paradise It Seems

By: John Cheever

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John Cheever: Complete Novels (LOA #189)

The Wapshot Chronicle / The Wapshot Scandal / Bullet Park / Falconer / Oh What a Paradise It Seems

By: John Cheever

Published to coincide with editor Blake Bailey's groundbreaking new biography, here are the five novels of John Cheever, together in one volume for the first time. In these dazzling works Cheever laid bare the failings and foibles of not just the ascendant postwar elite but also the fallen Yankee aristocrats who stubbornly and often grotesquely and hilariously cling to their shabby gentility as the last vestige of former glory. Complete Novels gathers: the riotous family saga The Wapshot Chronicle (winner of the National Book Award) and its sequel The Wapshot Scandal (winner of the William Dean Howells Medal); the dark suburban drama Bullet Park ("a magnificent work of fiction," John Gardner remarked in The New York Times Book Review); the prison novel Falconer, a radical departure that met with both critical and popular acclaim; and the lyrical ecological fable Oh What a Paradise It Seems. A companion volume, Collected Stories and Other Writings, is the largest edition of Cheever's stories ever. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Library of America

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ISBN 10

1598530356

ISBN 13

9781598530353

Falconer

By: John Cheever

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Falconer

By: John Cheever

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Stunning and brutally powerful, "one of the most important novels of our time" (The New York Times) tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back into childhood. In a nightmarish prison, out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction. Only Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make Falconer such a triumphant work of the moral imagination.

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225

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307760715

ISBN 13

9780307760715

Oh What a Paradise It Seems

By: John Cheever

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Oh What a Paradise It Seems

By: John Cheever

From one of the most renowned twentieth-century American writers, this “luminous ephiphany of life ... [is] a charming fable of old age, nostalgia, and loss” (The Washington Post Book World). Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever's final novel is a fable set in a village so idyllic it has no fast-food outlet and having as its protagonist an old man, Lemuel Sears, who still has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes. But Sears's paradise is threatened; the pond he loves is being fouled by unscrupulous polluters. In Cheever's accomplished hands the battle between an elderly romantic and the monstrous aspects of late-twentieth-century civilization becomes something ribald, poignant, and ineffably joyful. "This is perfect Cheever—it is perfect." —The New York Times Book Review

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113

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307759989

ISBN 13

9780307759986

The Wapshot Scandal

By: John Cheever

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The Wapshot Scandal

By: John Cheever

From one of the greatest writers of the 20th century—the darkly comic yet deeply compassionate sequel to the National Book Award–winning novel, The Wapshot Chronicles. Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever shares the further adventures of the Wapshot clan, which for generations has called the New England village of St. Botolphs home. Now, though, the family is cast far and wide: Coverly Wapshot to a secretive missile test site and the formidable Cousin Honora self-exiled in Italy after finding herself on the wrong side of the IRS. Meanwhile, closer to home, Coverly’s brother, Moses, is in dire straits—and worried that he’s being haunted by his father’s ghost. A powerful, sometimes bawdy work of fiction, The Wapshot Scandal is the story of one eccentric—and sometimes tragic—family from one of our greatest writers.

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353

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Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0593312902

ISBN 13

9780593312902

The Wapshot Chronicle

By: John Cheever

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The Wapshot Chronicle

By: John Cheever

When The Wapshot Chronicle was published in 1957, John Cheever was already recognized as a writer of superb short stories. But The Wapshot Chronicle, which won the 1958 National Book Award, established him as a major novelist. Based in part on Cheever’s adolescence in New England, the novel follows the destinies of the impecunious and wildly eccentric Wapshots of St. Botolphs, a quintessential Massachusetts fishing village. Here are the stories of Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea dog and would-be suicide; of his licentious older son, Moses; and of Moses’ adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, The Wapshot Chronicle is a family narrative in the tradition of Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James.

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372

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0060528877

ISBN 13

9780060528874

A Cheever Evening

A New Play Based on the Stories of John Cheever

By: Albert Ramsdell Gurney

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A Cheever Evening

A New Play Based on the Stories of John Cheever

By: Albert Ramsdell Gurney

THE STORY: John Cheever, master chronicler of America's post-war angst and alienation, and how it affected a burgeoning suburban class, left a storehouse of dramatic possibilities in his fiction, largely unexplored purely by dint of his chosen arti

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Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

082221458X

ISBN 13

9780822214588

Conversations with John Cheever

By: John Cheever

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Conversations with John Cheever

By: John Cheever

Interviews with the late novelist share his views on writing, literary fame, his major works, criticism, and his life and career

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259

Published Date

ISBN 10

0878053328

ISBN 13

9780878053322

Drinking

By: John Cheever

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Drinking

By: John Cheever

What's the worst another drink could do? John Cheever pours out our most sociable of vices, and hands it to us in a highball. From the calculating teenager who raids her parents' liquor cabinet, only to drown her sorrows in it, to the suburban swimmer withering away with every plunge he takes, these are stories suffused with beauty, sadness, and the gathering storm of a bender well-done. Seen through the gin-lacquered looking glass of Cheever's writing, your next drink may have you reaching for a lime and soda instead. Selected from the book Collected Storiesby John CheeverVINTAGE MINIS- GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us humanAlso in the Vintage Minis series-Swimming by Roger DeakinEating by Nigella LawsonCalm by Tim PeaksLoveby Jeanette Winterson

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118

Publisher

Arrow

Published Date

ISBN 10

1784872644

ISBN 13

9781784872649

The Jewels of the Cabots

By: John Cheever

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The Jewels of the Cabots

By: John Cheever

In this fabulous short story, the crown jewel of John Cheever’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Stories of John Cheever, a man agonizes about class privilege and racism, confessing to the knowledge of a terrible crime and exposing a quiet American family’s darkest secrets. Wandering about the sleepy Connecticut town of his childhood, where residents lead lives of grueling boredom, a journalist reminisces about the Cabot children: Molly, a sweet girl and his first love; Geneva who pilfered her mother’s diamonds from the clothesline and ran off to the Middle East; Wallace, Mr. Cabot’s bastard son who lives in the tenements across the river; and the dwarf, Mrs. Cabot’s child from an earlier marriage. An ebook short. A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection.

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Vintage

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ISBN 10

110197320X

ISBN 13

9781101973202

Bullet Park

By: John Cheever

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Bullet Park

By: John Cheever

From "a master American storyteller" (TIME), Bullet Park traces the fateful intersection of two men: Eliot Nailles, a nice fellow who loves his wife and son to blissful distraction, and the man who, after half a lifetime of drifting, settles down in Bullet Park with one objective—to murder Nailles's son. Welcome to Bullet Park, a township in which even the most buttoned-down gentry sometimes manage to terrify themselves simply by looking in the mirror. In these exemplary environs Pulitzer Prize winner John Cheever delivers a lyrical and mordantly funny hymn to the American suburb—and to all the dubious normalcy it represents—written with unparalleled artistry and assurance. “A magnificent work of fiction.… A novel to pore over, move around in, live with." —The New York Times

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257

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0679737871

ISBN 13

9780679737872

The Letters of John Cheever

By: John Cheever

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The Letters of John Cheever

By: John Cheever

Cheever's letters to his wife, lovers, and children are collected, annotated, and punctuated with passages from journals, presenting the story of the writer's life.

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454

Publisher

Touchstone

Published Date

ISBN 10

0671687441

ISBN 13

9780671687441

Lives of the Novelists

A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

By: John Sutherland

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Lives of the Novelists

A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

By: John Sutherland

No previous author has attempted a book such as this: a complete history of novels written in the English language, from the genre's seventeenth-century origins to the present day. In the spirit of Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, acclaimed critic and scholar John Sutherland selects 294 writers whose works illustrate the best of every kind of fiction—from gothic, penny dreadful, and pornography to fantasy, romance, and high literature. Each author was chosen, Professor Sutherland explains, because his or her books are well worth reading and are likely to remain so for at least another century. Sutherland presents these authors in chronological order, in each case deftly combining a lively and informative biographical sketch with an opinionated assessment of the writer's work. Taken together, these novelists provide both a history of the novel and a guide to its rich variety. Always entertaining, and sometimes shocking, Sutherland considers writers as diverse as Daniel Defoe, Henry James, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Michael Crichton, Jeffrey Archer, and Jacqueline Susann. Written for all lovers of fiction, Lives of the Novelists succeeds both as introduction and re-introduction, as Sutherland presents favorite and familiar novelists in new ways and transforms the less favored and less familiar through his relentlessly fascinating readings.

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1456

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300182430

ISBN 13

9780300182439

The Titans

By: John Jakes

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The Titans

By: John Jakes

The Kent family faces internal clashes as the Civil War ignites—from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of North and South. In the hellish years of the Civil War, the Kent family faces its greatest trials yet. Louis, the devious son of the late Amanda Kent, is in control of the dynasty—and of its seemingly inevitable collapse. His cousin Jephtha Kent, meanwhile, backs the abolitionist cause, while his sons remain devoted Southerners. As the country fractures around the Kents, John Jakes introduces characters that include some of the most famous Americans of this defining era. Spanning the full breadth of the Civil War—from the brutal frontlines in the South to the political tangle in Washington—The Titans chronicles two struggles for identity: the country’s and the Kents’. This ebook features an illustrated biography of John Jakes including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

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681

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Open Road Media

Published Date

ISBN 10

145325594X

ISBN 13

9781453255940

The Kent Family Chronicles Volumes Four Through Six

The Furies, The Titans, and The Warriors

By: John Jakes

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The Kent Family Chronicles Volumes Four Through Six

The Furies, The Titans, and The Warriors

By: John Jakes

A family builds its empire in books four through six of an American historical epic from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of North and South. This multigenerational saga follows the Kent family in their pursuit of a better future in the expanding United States amid deceit, passion, and violence. From the brutal Battle of the Alamo to the bloody Civil War, their fate is intertwined with the course of American history in these three volumes of the series. The Furies: Spanning from 1836 to 1852, the fourth Kent Family novel opens with Amanda Kent just escaping the massacre at the Alamo. Brazen and focused, she works to make a new life for herself during the California Gold Rush, and she’s willing to risk everything to restore her family’s name . . . The Titans: In the hellish years of the Civil War, while the nation struggles with its identity, the Kent family fights greed and hatred. In New York, devious Louis Kent controls the family dynasty—now on the verge of collapse. Meanwhile, his cousin Jephtha Kent backs the abolitionist cause even though it may cost him his sons . . . The Warriors: With the advent of the transcontinental railroad, the Kents continue to fight for their place among America’s wealthy. Temptation beckons young Jeremiah Kent as a Southern belle lures him into a trap of lust, lies, and murder. The nation may be facing a rebirth, but that doesn’t mean all survive . . .

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2011

Publisher

Open Road Media

Published Date

ISBN 10

1504057562

ISBN 13

9781504057561

Odd Jobs

Essays and Criticism

By: John Updike

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Odd Jobs

Essays and Criticism

By: John Updike

To complement his work as a fiction writer, John Updike accepted any number of odd jobs—book reviews and introductions, speeches and tributes, a “few paragraphs” on baseball or beauty or Borges—and saw each as “an opportunity to learn something, or to extract from within some unsuspected wisdom.” In this, his largest collection of assorted prose, he brings generosity and insight to the works and lives of William Dean Howells, George Bernard Shaw, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, and dozens more. Novels from outposts of postmodernism like Turkey, Albania, Israel, and Nigeria are reviewed, as are biographies of Cleopatra and Dorothy Parker. The more than a hundred considerations of books are flanked, on one side, by short stories, a playlet, and personal essays, and, on the other, by essays on his own oeuvre. Updike’s odd jobs would be any other writer’s chief work.

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1025

Publisher

Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812983793

ISBN 13

9780812983791

More Matter

Essays and Criticism

By: John Updike

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More Matter

Essays and Criticism

By: John Updike

In this collection of nonfiction pieces, John Updike gathers his responses to nearly two hundred invitations into print, each “an opportunity to make something beautiful, to find within oneself a treasure that would otherwise remain buried.” Introductions, reviews, and humorous essays, paragraphs on New York, religion, and lust—here is “more matter” commissioned by an age that, as the author remarks in his Preface, calls for “real stuff . . . not for the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction.” Still, the novelist’s shaping hand, his gift for telling detail, can be detected in many of these literary considerations. Books by Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are incisively treated, as are biographies of Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and Helen Keller. As George Steiner observed, Updike writes with a “solicitous, almost tender intelligence. The critic and the poet in him . . . are at no odds with the novelist; the same sharpness of apprehension bears on the object in each of Updike’s modes.”

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929

Publisher

Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

030748839X

ISBN 13

9780307488398

The War of 1812 U.S. War Department Correspondence, 1812-1815

By: John C. Fredriksen

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The War of 1812 U.S. War Department Correspondence, 1812-1815

By: John C. Fredriksen

The War of 1812 saw the United States wracked by political dissent and saddled with a problematic military policy. The new nation notably failed in its attempted occupation of Canada in a bid to leverage better treatment from Great Britain but in two and a half years of fighting, there were American victories and defeats, none of which decisively altered events or advanced the national agenda. In the end, the grievances listed in President Madison's war message to Congress--British harassment of American shipping, the impressment of American citizens and the instigation of hostilities by Indian tribes--were all mitigated by the time the Treaty of Ghent was signed in 1814 (mainly attributable to the fall of Napoleon). This collection of War Department correspondence gives a complete account through more than 11,000 official and unofficial letters, annotated and indexed here for the first time.

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488

Publisher

McFarland

Published Date

ISBN 10

1476625433

ISBN 13

9781476625430

John Gardner on Writing

On Becoming a Novelist, On Writers & Writing, and On Moral Fiction

By: John Gardner

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John Gardner on Writing

On Becoming a Novelist, On Writers & Writing, and On Moral Fiction

By: John Gardner

Three books in one volume: Advice and reflections on modern fiction from “one of the greatest creative writing teachers we’ve ever had” (Frederick Busch). In On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner advises the aspiring fiction author on such topics as the value of creative writing workshops, the developmental stages of literary growth, and the inevitable experience of writer’s block. Drawn from his two decades of experience in creative writing, Gardner balances his compassion for his students with his knowledge of the publishing industry, and truthfully relates his experiences of the hardships that lie ahead for aspiring authors. In On Writers & Writing, acclaimed novelist John Gardner discusses the craft of fiction writing, taking to task some of his best-known contemporaries in the process. Gardner criticizes some for writing disingenuous fiction, and commends others who produce literature that acts as a life-affirming force. He offers insights into and exacting critiques on such writers as Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and John Cheever, while addressing his personal influences and delivering broad-ranging observations on literary culture. And in On Moral Fiction, John Gardner’s thesis is simple: “True art is by its nature moral.” Since the book’s first publication, the passion behind Gardner’s assertion has both provoked and inspired readers. In examining the work of his peers, Gardner analyzes what has gone wrong, in his view, in modern art and literature, and how shortcomings in artistic criticism have contributed to the problem. He develops his argument by showing how artists and critics can reintroduce morality and substance to their work to improve society and cultivate our morality.

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823

Publisher

Open Road Media

Published Date

ISBN 10

148046600X

ISBN 13

9781480466005

Literary Executions

Capital Punishment and American Culture, 1820–1925

By: John Cyril Barton

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Literary Executions

Capital Punishment and American Culture, 1820–1925

By: John Cyril Barton

In Literary Executions, John Barton analyzes nineteenth-century representations of, responses to, and arguments for and against the death penalty in the United States. The author creates a generative dialogue between artistic relics and legal history. Novels, short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction engage with legislative reports, trial transcripts, legal documents, newspaper and journal articles, treatises, and popular books (like The Record of Crimes and The Gallows, the Prison, and the Poor House), all of which participated in the debate over capital punishment. Barton focuses on several canonical figures--James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Theodore Dreiser--and offers new readings of their work in light of the death penalty controversy. Barton also gives close attention to a host of then-popular-but-now-forgotten writers--particularly John Neal, Slidell MacKenzie, William Gilmore Simms, Sylvester Judd, and George Lippard--whose work helped shape or was in turn shaped by the influential anti-gallows movement. As illustrated in the book's epigraph by Samuel Johnson -- "Depend upon it Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully" -- Barton argues that the high stakes of capital punishment dramatize the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority. In bringing together the social and the aesthetic, Barton traces the emergence of the modern State's administration of lawful death. The book is intended primarily for literary scholars, but cultural and legal historians will also find value in it, as will anyone interested in the intersections among law, culture, and the humanities"--

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345

Publisher

JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1421413329

ISBN 13

9781421413327

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