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John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings

The Stories of John Cheever (1978) | seven additional stories from The Way Some People Live (1943) | seven uncollected stories More

Edited by Blake Bailey

“A landmark volume of one of America’s great short story writers. Essential.” — Library Journal (starred review)

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

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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.

Blake Bailey, volume editor, is the author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. His biography of John Cheever won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

The Stories of John Cheever
Preface
Goodbye, My Brother
The Common Day
The Enormous Radio
O City of Broken Dreams
The Hartleys
The Sutton Place Story
The Summer Farmer
Torch Song
The Pot of Gold
Clancy in the Tower of Babel
Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor
The Season of Divorce
The Chaste Clarissa
The Cure
The Superintendent
The Children
The Sorrows of Gin
O Youth and Beauty!
The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well
The Five-Forty-Eight
Just One More Time
The Housebreaker of Shady Hill
The Bus to St. James’s
The Worm in the Apple
The Trouble of Marcie Flint
The Bella Lingua
The Wrysons
The Country Husband
The Duchess
The Scarlet Moving Van
Just Tell Me Who It Was
Brimmer
The Golden Age
The Lowboy
The Music Teacher
A Woman Without a Country
The Death of Justina
Clementina
Boy in Rome
A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear
The Chimera
The Seaside Houses
The Angel of the Bridge
The Brigadier and the Golf Widow
A Vision of the World
Reunion
An Educated American Woman
Metamorphoses
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin
Montraldo
The Ocean
Marito in Città
The Geometry of Love
The Swimmer
The World of Apples
Another Story
Percy
The Fourth Alarm
Artemis, the Honest Well-Digger
Three Stories
The Jewels of the Cabots

From The Way Some People Live
Summer Theatre
Forever Hold Your Peace
Of Love: A Testimony
The Brothers
Publick House
When Grandmother Goes
These Tragic Years

Other Stories
Expelled
The Autobiography of a Drummer
In Passing
Play a March
Town House
Roseheath
The National Pastime

Other Writings
What Happened
Moving Out
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Melancholy of Distance
On Saul Bellow
Why I Write Short Stories
My Friend, Malcolm Cowley

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-034-6 1040 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 188 Library of America Series

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