When this book was originally issued in 1994, it was the first new collection of Cheever stories in over 15 years. Now, with a comprehensive new biography recently published, and the writings of Cheever bought into the canon of the respected Library of America, here is a key collection of 13 early stories from the 1930s and 1940s, 11 of which cannot be found anywhere else. In this intriguing collection, Cheever plunges us into a stark world of strike-breaking, down-and-outers, burlesque shows, desperate gamblers, and deferred hopes. Called 'the best kept secret of American letters' and 'a virtual literary treasure trove', these stories add a new dimension to the assessment of John Cheever's considerable reputation. Cheever published these stories in the 1930s and 1940s in magazines which ran the gamut from obscure leftist literary periodicals, through "The New Republic" and "The Atlantic Monthly", to mass circulation glossies like "Colliers" and "Cosmopolitan", dealing with themes and using techniques which are not generally considered to be 'Cheeveresque'. They will undoubtedly surprise those readers familiar with his 1950s work. Each of these early stories bears the unmistakable stamp of the master storyteller....

In these journals, the experiences of one of the most renowned twentieth-century American writers come to life with fascinating, wholly revealing detail.

John Cheever's journals provide peerless insights into the creation of his novels and stories. But they are equally the record of a complex, often dark, always closely observed inner world. No American writer of comparable stature has left such an unreservedly revealing and moving account of himself: his family life, his literary life, and his emotional life. The final word from one of modern America's great writers, The Journals of John Cheever provides a powerful and beautiful capstone to a towering oeuvre....

Published to coincide with editor Blake Bailey’s groundbreaking new biography, here are the five novels of John Cheever, together in one volume for the first time. In these dazzling works Cheever laid bare the failings and foibles of not just the ascendant postwar elite but also the fallen Yankee aristocrats who stubbornly— and often grotesquely and hilariously—cling to their shabby gentility as the last vestige of former glory. Complete Novels gathers: the riotous family saga The Wapshot Chronicle (winner of the National Book Award) and its sequel The Wapshot Scandal (winner of the William Dean Howells Medal); the dark suburban drama Bullet Park (“a magnificent work of fiction,” John Gardner remarked in The New York Times Book Review); the prison novel Falconer, a radical departure that met with both critical and popular acclaim; and the lyrical ecological fable Oh What a Paradise It Seems. A companion volume, Collected Stories and Other Writings, is the largest edition of Cheever’s stories ever....

Published to coincide with editor Blake Bailey’s groundbreaking new biography, here is the definitive edition of the stories of John Cheever. Set in the tony suburbs of Westchester and Connecticut, Cheever’s classic stories charted a country as recognizable and essential to American literature as Faulkner’s or Hawthorne’s. “Many people have written about suburbia,” John Updike observed, “only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it.” Collected Stories and Other Writings combines the entire Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, The Stories of John Cheever, with seven selections from his first book, The Way Some People Live (1943)—here restored to print—and seven additional stories first published in periodicals between 1930 and 1953. Included are masterpieces such as “The Enormous Radio,” “Goodbye, My Brother,” and “The Swimmer,” as well as lesser-known gems. Rounding out the volume are essays about writers and writing, including an appreciation of F. Scott Fitzgerald and an account of a visit to Chekhov’s house. A companion volume, Complete Novels, gathers Cheever’s five novels in one volume for the first time....

Here are twelve magnificent stories in which John Cheever celebrates -- with unequaled grace and tenderness -- the deepest feelings we have.

As Cheever writes in his preface, 'These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.'

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1978 The Stories of John Cheever won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly before his death, in 1982, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Benjamin Cheever is the author of The Plagiarist, The Parisian and Famous after Death.

• The Enormous Radio read by Meryl Streep
  
• The Five-Forty-Eight read by Edward Herrmann
  
• O City of Broken Dreams read by Blythe Danner
  
• Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor read by George Plimpton
  
• The Season of Divorce read by Edward Herrmann
  
• The Brigadier and the Golf Widow read by Peter Gallagher
  
• The Sorrows of Gin read by Meryl Streep
  
• O Youth and Beauty! read by Peter Gallagher
  
• The Chaste Clarissa read by Blythe Danner
  
• The Jewels of the Cabots read by George Plimpton
  
• The Death of Justina read by John Cheever
  
• The Swimmer read by John Cheever
  

...

John Cheever, novelist, short-story writer, and winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, was "an American master" (The Boston Globe). He was also a prolific writer of letters, sending as many as thirty in a week.

These letters, culled from thousands written to famous writers, his family, friends, and lovers, paint an intimate and surprising self-portrait that is as vivid as any character Cheever invented.

Edited and annotated by his son Benjamin, Cheever's letters trace his development as a writer and as a man. They reveal him to be complex, flawed, and full of contradictions. On display are not just his ambitions and weaknesses, or his cloaked bisexuality, but the evolution of his wit and style -- and most of all, his immense love of life....