by Blake Bailey
First published 2009
Blake Bailey opens John Cheever's private world through his extensive journals, most of which had never seen print before this biography. The author reveals how Cheever crafted his public persona as an ideal suburban gentleman while documenting the contradictions beneath that carefully maintained surface. Bailey draws from Cheever's own massive written record to show how the writer observed and captured postwar American life. The book traces Cheever's method of using his gentleman's mask to gain access to the suburban world he would later dissect in his fiction. Bailey demonstrates how Cheever's personal struggles and observations fed directly into his role as a major chronicler of mid-century America. The biography shows how Cheever's journals provided the raw material for understanding both the man and his literary achievement in capturing the complexities of postwar suburban existence.
Genres: biography, american-fiction, 20th-century, american, biography-memoir
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Period: Mid-20th Century
770 pages · Hardcover · Knopf