![]() ![]() 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. “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.”Ĭheever’s 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. 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. 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. John Cheever’s stories rank among the finest achievements of twentieth-century short fiction. ![]()
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