John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America, No. 188)

John Cheevers 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. Cheevers 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 offeringalong with seven other stories that Cheever never collectedan 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 Baileys groundbreaking biography is the largest collection of Cheevers 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 nations literary heritage by publishing and keeping permanently in print Americas 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.