Cheever

Cheever himself was born into a middle-class family, his father being employed in the shoe business then booming in New England. With the eventual failure of the shoe industry and the difficulties of his parents’ marriage, he had an unhappy adolescence. His expulsion at age 17 from the Thayer Academy in Massachusetts provided the theme for his first published story, which appeared in The New Republic in 1930. During the Great Depression he lived in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Cheever married in 1941 and had three children. In 1942 he enlisted in the army to train as an infantryman, but the army soon reassigned him to the Signal Corps as a scriptwriter for training films. After the war Cheever and his wife moved from New York City to the suburbs, whose culture and mores are often examined in his subsequent fiction.

Cheever’s name was closely associated with The New Yorker, a periodical that published many of his stories, but his works also appeared in The New Republic, Collier’s, Story, and The Atlantic. A master of the short story, Cheever worked from “the interrupted event,” which he considered the prime source of short stories. He was famous for his clear and elegant prose and his careful fashioning of incidents and anecdotes. He is perhaps best-known for the two stories "The Enormous Radio" (1947) and "The Swimmer" (1964; filmed 1968). In the former story a young couple discovers that their new radio receives the conversations of other people in their apartment building but that this fascinating look into other people’s problems does not solve their own. In "The Swimmer" a suburban man decides to swim his way home in the backyard pools of his neighbours and finds on the way that he