John Cheever

John Cheever (May 27, 1912–June 18, 1982) was an American novelist born in Quincy, Massachusetts. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. On April 27, 1982, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A number of Cheever's early works were published in The New Republic, Collier's Story, and The Atlantic. In 1935 he began a lifelong assocation with the New Yorker. In 1943, he published his first book, The Way Some People Live, which depicted the life of Upper-Eastside and suburban residents or dealt with Cheever's own experiences as a recruit. Originally the stories had appeared in magazines. During World War II Cheever had served four years as an infantry gunner and member of the Signal Corps.

After the war in 1951, Cheever received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to become a full-time writer. He published numerous novels and collection, including The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953), The Wapshot Chronicle (1957). The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Howells Medal for The Wapshot Chronicle (1964).

From 1956 to 1957 Cheever taught writing at Barnard College. Later he was a teacher at the University of Iowa and at Sing Sing prison in the early 1970s, and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Boston University (1974-75). Hi novel Falconer was published in 1977. Cheever's other major works include the experimental Bullet Park (1969), and The Stories of John Cheever (1978) which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Books Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award. Cheever died in 1982, at the age of 70, in Ossinning, New York.

Faculty |Iowa Writers' Workshop
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