Cheever (Hardcover) ~ Blake Bailey (Author) Cover Art

Cheever (Hardcover)

By: Blake Bailey (Author)

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Review

"[A] stunningly detailed biography, exploring set by stumbling step the crooked path that Cheever followed...so wise and serious, so human an account..."

"Blake Bailey's biography...is a triumph of thorough research and unblinkered appraisal..."

"[I]n Blake Bailey's wonderful and exhaustively researched biography of John Cheever,...it seems that loneliness was the hallmark of the great writer's life and probably the most significant inspiration for his art."

"Mr. Bailey, with uncommon grace and evenhandedness, tracks Cheever's artistic brilliance amid chronic self-delusion and paranoia of being unmasked...as impotent and a homosexual....The book is a definitive, Dickensian rendering of a complete and complicated life, addictively readable and long overdue."

"Bailey's exhaustively researched but compulsively readable work brings Cheever to gin-reeking life. It is, quite simply, the best example of literary biography I have ever read."

"The formidable achievement of [Cheever's] short stories alone ensures that he is destined to be the subject of periodic rediscovery, reassessment and biographical shading-in....Yet the man was himself, as Blake Bailey's fascinating biography...makes clear, an oversensitive instrument. Cheever combined uncomfortably the instincts of a satirist and a lyric poet."

"Blake Bailey's new 770-page biography of writer John Cheever is one of the year's most anticipated...Since Cheever's previous biographer lacked access to the writer's vast journals, Bailey's book is in some ways the first to take full account of his torment over his long-hidden bisexuality."

""[T]he subject of Blake Bailey's masterful [biography is]... Cheever's hard-won revelation: If he wrote not merely as the outsider but about the outsider--wrote himself, in other words, stripped of his costumes, a whoever from a different world--he would find his readers right there with him."

"For all that sensibility's gloom and doom, there was something irrepressible about Cheever's spirits that resisted the tragic. Bailey's biography is absorbing, mainly because he gets down his subject's humorous staying power, even in the midst of spiritual turmoil."

Publisher's note

For the first time: the full and unforgettable life of John Cheever (1912-1982), written with unprecedented access to essential sources--including Cheever's massive journal, only a fraction of which has ever been published.
Blake Bailey shows us a soul in conflict: a proud Yankee who flaunted his lineage while deploring the provincialism of his Quincy, Massachusetts, family circle; a high school dropout who published his first story at eighteen; a pioneer of suburban realist fiction who continually pushed the boundaries of realism; a dire alcoholic who recovered to write the great novel "Falconer"; a secret bisexual who struggled with his longings and his fierce homophobia in a revolving door of self-loathing and hedonism. We see a man who concealed his anxieties behind the mask of the genial Westchester squire; the paterfamilias in Brooks Brothers clothes whose world was peopled by legendary writers and beautiful women (Malcolm Cowley, Saul Bellow, William Maxwell, Hope Lange, and John Updike, among them); whose groundbreaking work landed him on the covers of "Time "and "Newsweek"; who believed in the power of family love and sexual pleasure; a man whose desperate loneliness was never wholly offset by his faith in the joy of creation.
Blake Bailey has written a luminous biography, a revelation of a writer of timeless fiction and of the man behind the work.

The first full and unforgettable portrait of the life of John Cheever shows us a soul in conflict: high-school dropout, dire alcoholic, secret bisexual who struggled with his longings and fierce homophobia, and a man who concealed his deeply-rooted anxieties while becoming one of the most iconic literary figures of our time.

Annotation

John Cheever is synonymous with literary fiction of the 1950s, for he chronicled that era's surface calm and inner turmoil with uncanny precision, perhaps because he himself was made up of such opposites. From his status as The New Yorker's golden boy--he published more than 100 stories there--to his turbulent hidden life, brimming with alcohol and poly-amorous affairs, Cheever's personality emerges here in all its complexity. Blake Bailey, who previously chronicled the life of Cheever's contemporary, Richard Yates, shares with his subject a talent for perfectly placed detail in a work that will strengthen Cheever's already formidable reputation.

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