John Cheever

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John Cheever

John Cheever (born May 27, 1912 in Quincy , Massachusetts , † June 18, 1982 in Ossining , New York ) was an American writer .

Life

Cheever was his first in New York published short stories known, for he 1979 Pulitzer Prize awarded. As in his novels (for The Wapshot Chronicle he had already received the National Book Award in 1958 and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1965) he dealt mostly with the ambiguous life in the American suburbs (hence his nickname “Chekhov the suburbs ”) as well as with the topics of alcohol and homosexuality. Cheever, put on a par with William Faulkner by his colleague John Updike and named as a role model by contemporary authors such as Jonathan Franzen or TC Boyle , has long been considered a scandal-free, socially highly recognized writer in the USA. It was only in his final years that details of his massive drinking problems, bisexuality, and unhappy marriage became known.

Growing up in precarious circumstances and living hand-to-mouth for a long time at the beginning of his career, Cheever has always strived for a middle-class life. As this wish came true with increasing success, however, he dissected this life in the suburbs with great insight. In satirical form, he took a look behind the facade of the decency displayed there and showed that behind the short-cropped lawns, the front gardens and houses, which were always the same, a huge emptiness opened up, which was filled with alcohol, partner swaps and intolerance towards everything foreign. His inner turmoil between the desire to belong and the realization of how mendacious this life was always becomes clear. But in his stories - even his novels are often a collection of brilliantly told short stories - Cheever was and remained a funny, stylistically excellent narrator overflowing with ideas. This applies both to the two Wapshot novels, a modern picaresque story with a tragic-elegiac outcome, and to Bullet Park , in which the lives of the two main characters Paul Hammer and Eliot Nailles, as their names suggest, are fatally linked is, and for the late prison novel Falconer . What all of this has to do with Cheever's own life can best be traced in Cheever's diaries, which (due to a length of over 20,000 manuscript pages) have only been published or translated in excerpts, but read like an exciting novel.

In 1966 Cheever was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1982, several years after he had finally renounced alcohol, Cheever received the national medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters , of which he had been a member since 1957, for his complete works . Six weeks later, three weeks after his 70th birthday, he succumbed to longstanding cancer. His latest short novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems , was written when Cheever was already seriously ill with cancer and was published three months before his death.

Cheever was married to Mary Winternitz (1918-2014) since 1941. The two had three children.

Quotes

"Nobody has ever written like John Cheever in his journal"

- Peter Handke : In front of the tree shadow wall at night

Trivia

Cheever preferred to work in underwear and thought an erection was good for concentration:

"With an erect penis, I can even read the small letters in the Bible."

- John Cheever

In the US sitcom Seinfeld , the episode “Die Liebesbriefe” / “The Letters of John Cheever” (Season 4) refers to the bisexuality of John Cheever. It turns out that the father of George Costanza's friend Susan Ross had a sexual relationship with Cheever.

Works

Short stories:

  • The Way Some People Live . 1943
  • The Enormous Radio and Other Stories . 1953
  • (with Jean Stafford, Daniel Fuchs, William Maxwell) Stories . 1956
  • The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories . 1958
  • Some People, Places and Things That Will Not Appear In My Next Novel . 1961
  • The Brigadier and the Golf Widow . 1964
  • The World of Apples . 1973
  • The Stories of John Cheever . Knopf, New York 1978, ISBN 0-394-50087-3
  • Thirteen Uncollected Stories . Academy Chicago, Chicago 1994, ISBN 0-89733-405-1
  • Collected Stories and Other Writings . Library of America , New York 2009, ISBN 978-1-59853-034-6

Novels:

  • The Wapshot Chronicle . Harper & Bros., New York 1957
    • German edition: The love Wapshots . Rowohlt, Hamburg 1958 (German by Arno Dohm)
    • German edition: The history of the Wapshots . DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-8321-8007-2 (German by Thomas Gunkel)
  • The Wapshot Scandal . Harper & Row, New York 1964
    • German edition: The bad Wapshots . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1967 (German by Paul Baudisch)
    • German edition: The Wapshot scandal . DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-8321-8030-0 (German by Thomas Gunkel)
  • Bullet Park . Knopf, New York 1969
  • Falconer . Knopf, New York 1977. ISBN 0-394-41071-8
    • German edition: Falconer . Droemer Knaur, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-426-08909-2 (German by Dieter Dörr)
    • German edition: Welcome to Falconer . DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 2012. ISBN 978-3-8321-8069-0 (German by Thomas Gunkel)
  • Oh What a Paradise It Seems . Knopf, New York 1982, ISBN 0-394-51334-7
    • German edition: No beautiful country… Volk & Welt, Berlin 1984 (German by Reinhild Böhnke)
    • German edition: Oh, this paradise . DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 2013, ISBN 978-3-8321-9691-2 (German by Thomas Gunkel)
  • Complete novels . Library of America, New York 2009, ISBN 978-1-59853-035-3

Letters and Diaries:

Film adaptations (selection)

literature

Web links

Wikiquote: en: John Cheever  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members: John Cheever. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 22, 2019 .
  2. ↑ See Franz Link: John Cheever . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 464-471, here p. 470.
  3. ↑ Peter Handke: In front of the tree shadow wall at night. Signs and approaches from the periphery 2007-2015. Salzburg / Vienna 2016. p. 94.
  4. ↑ Favorite rituals of famous geniuses - The everyday madness Spiegel Online, October 18, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Cheever, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 27, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Quincy , Massachusetts , United States
DATE OF DEATH June 18, 1982
Place of death Ossining , NY , United States