American literature of the second half of 20 century

  Cheever, John

• Cheever, John (1912-1982), American writer, best known for his short stories dealing with the ironies of contemporary American life.
• The Way Some People Live (1943), The Enormous Radio (1954), The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958), The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964), and The World of Apples (1973). An omnibus edition, The Stories of John Cheever (1978), won him the 1979Pulitzer Prize in literature. As a novelist, Cheever is noted for The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) and its sequel, The Wapshot Scandal (1964); the first volume received a National Book Award in 1958. These novels deal with the wealthy, eccentric Wapshot family in suburban Massachusetts and expand on themes that Cheever explored in his shorter fiction. Much more somber commentaries on modern family life are found in his later novels: Bullet Park (1969), which deals with a suburban family threatened with violence, and Falconer (1977), the story of a drug-addicted college professor imprisoned for fratricide. Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982), a very short novel, marked a return to Cheever's more amused and hopeful contemplation of contemporary life. The Journals of John Cheever was published posthumously in 1991.