| Letters of John Cheever
(1988)
|
| Front Cover |
Book Details |
|
| Author |
| John Cheever |
| Benjamin Cheever |
|
| Selling Price |
$15.50
|
| Genre |
Fiction |
| Publication Date |
1988 |
| Format |
Hardcover
(250
mm)
|
| Publisher |
Simon & Schuster |
| Language |
English |
| Extras |
Dust Jacket |
|
| Plot |
Novelist, short-story writer, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Price, John Cheever is one of America's most significant literary figures. At his death in 1982 he left an enduring body of published work which both perfectly captures the lives of a class of men and women in he middle of our century - their aspirations and tribulations, their peccadillos as well as their graver sins - and elevates those same lives to the transcendent level of myth.
Cheever was also a prolific writer of letters, sometimes sending as many as thirty in a single week. The letters of John Cheever, edited by the author's son Benjamin, is the first volume to present this significant addition to Cheever's literary legacy.
Cheever used to urge his correspondents to throw away the letters he sent. Saving a letter is like trying to preserve a kiss, he said. But, despite this injunction, thousands of letters were saved. Collected, annotated and punctuated with passages from his copious journals, they present the story of a writer's life. And like all hs stories, it is brilliantly told. As his editor and friend William Maxwell said, 'John Cheever never wrote a bad letter. When he wrote to me it was always precisely as if he were on the high wire.'
Cheever addressed every aspect and period of his life in his correspondence, from his days as an aspiring young writer to the years following the triumphant success of The Stories of John Cheever, from his feelings about his work and others' to his bisexuality and his successful battle with alcoholism. Among those he wrote to and about were some of our most respected writers - Saul Bellow, Malcolm Cowley, William Maxwell, John Updike, Eleanor Clark, Robert Penn Warren, Josephine Herbst, Irwin Shaw and Philip Roth.
The man who emerges here and in the letters to his wife, his lovers and his children is strikingly different from the public figure Cheever presented to the world. He's more frank and less decorous. The writing is less self-conscious than is the writing for which he is best known, but no less elegant. One of the reasons these letters are so powerful is that he honestly thought they were going to be thrown away. |
| Personal Details |
| Condition |
Fine |
| Owner |
FamilyHistorySites |
| FHS ItemID |
20040546 |
|
| Product Details |
| LoC Classification |
PS3505.H6428Z48 1988 |
| Dewey |
813.52 B 19 |
| ISBN |
0671628739 |
| Paper Type |
acid-free paper |
| Nr of Pages |
397 |
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