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When All the Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever
A sympathetic and illuminating account of the stories of John Cheever, and the intersecting life and work of the legendary writer John Cheever, as told by his eldest daughter.
That extraordinary book, The Stories of John Cheever, published in 1978, brought together some of the finest American short stories ever written. Cheever’s collection was heralded with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and it would go on not only to sell millions of copies but also to define the American short story and shape a generation of writers. The chronicles of modern life both emerged from a distinctly American culture and also created it— inspiring everything from Mad Men to a Raymond Carver sequel, from rock songs to a Seinfeld episode.
In that same home where the Chekhov of suburbia refined his style lived Susan Cheever, the writer’s eldest daughter, who read what he read, heard what he heard, and watched her father type on the cheap yellow paper he favored. A daughter much like Susan appears in many of Cheever’s stories and a family much like theirs is at the center of them. After his death in 1982, Susan looks back on her father’s work and seeks to understand the connections between art and life. How did a bit of local gossip, a slice of Greek myth, and a new translation of Madame Bovary somehow become a brilliant gem like “The Country Husband” or “The Swimmer”? When All the Men Wore Hats is that exploration.
That extraordinary book, The Stories of John Cheever, published in 1978, brought together some of the finest American short stories ever written. Cheever’s collection was heralded with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and it would go on not only to sell millions of copies but also to define the American short story and shape a generation of writers. The chronicles of modern life both emerged from a distinctly American culture and also created it— inspiring everything from Mad Men to a Raymond Carver sequel, from rock songs to a Seinfeld episode.
In that same home where the Chekhov of suburbia refined his style lived Susan Cheever, the writer’s eldest daughter, who read what he read, heard what he heard, and watched her father type on the cheap yellow paper he favored. A daughter much like Susan appears in many of Cheever’s stories and a family much like theirs is at the center of them. After his death in 1982, Susan looks back on her father’s work and seeks to understand the connections between art and life. How did a bit of local gossip, a slice of Greek myth, and a new translation of Madame Bovary somehow become a brilliant gem like “The Country Husband” or “The Swimmer”? When All the Men Wore Hats is that exploration.
400 pages, Hardcover
Published October 28, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 28, 2025
He was a wise man on the page and an idiot at the lunch table.
Relax. This is a critical commentary, not an extension of the author’s earlier memoir of her father. Slices of biography are served but sparingly; and Susan Cheever WAS there when her father’s work was being prepared. Commendably, her aim is to inform and deepen, not scold and restrict.
That takes some nobility. That John Cheever was an alcoholic, snobbish, bad-tempered, walking disaster area has been well known since the publication of his journals and letters in the early 90s. It seems he over-achieved in sulking. During a stay in a drying-out facility - one of many - he would use his allotted calls to telephone his adult daughter at work (forty ‘blocks’ away) to loose torrents of molten self-pity. He wasn’t being treated like a feted writer but like a common soaker! Worse, they made fun of his…accent! (Imagine the voice of the dodgy mayor from The Simpsons and you’ve got it.)
How such muddled human beings spin their lives into art is an enduring mystery, treated here with a careful balance of candour, respect, and room for awe.
We learn the career-defining The Stories of John Cheever was really the swan-song of that career, largely intended as a cash-in following the unexpected success of Falconer. Grouping the stories together and publishing them was the brainchild of Cheever’s editor, not the author, who had an almost pathological fear of revisiting the past. The stories’ order was also the editor’s doing; they were not, in fact, presented chronologically, but frequently moved around in compositional time to better vary the artist’s programme.
Susan was something of an artist’s model for many of the children in Cheever’s stories. It seems the seedy underbelly of the Cheever family was displayed so frequently in the pages of The New Yorker that the latter seemed more like a literary version of National Geographic. This has its funny moments. One tea-spraying moment comes when ‘The Country Husband’ comes up for analysis:
The story seems freer and richer than the previous stories, and the dinner table argument—a classic-goes on for two pages in which Louisa and Henry go at it while Francis Weed does everything wrong. Weed then goes upstairs and finds his older daughter flopped down in bed reading a sleazy magazine, True Romance. I did read a lot of gossip magazines, but this happened to be some soft-core porn that I had sent away for from an ad.
The story, for many Cheever’s greatest, was written to buy braces for his daughter, and with much complaint from the author about this fact. The result - a story that sweeps from death to life to wanting to shag the babysitter to visions of men in golden mail riding elephants - is masterful. Susan is not being facetious when she says she is proud to have had the crooked teeth that inspired the story - and few will disbelieve her. Good writing, after all, does not require pure intentions.
Susan is alert to aspects of Cheever’s work that others miss. When a Cheever story starts with contempt, she notes, it inevitably ends in fear, as in ‘The Angel of the Bridge.’ While the stories carefully paint the pastel watercolors of the suburbs, she argues, they frequently descend into horror, and the road there is lit by the energy of illicit sex and unwanted desires. The early masterpiece ‘The Enormous Radio’ introduces a surreal note, with its radio that magically picks up neighbours conversations and their deepest secrets. Susan also perceptively notes that what most people miss about ‘The Swimmer’, a surreal tale in which the seasons change in a single afternoon, is the story’s ending.
Usefully, the book reprints the stories under discussion at the back end - and all are well chosen. I am pleased to see ‘The Housebreaker of Shady Hill’ included here, not least because Julian Barnes’s recent selection unaccountably excluded it. In a just world, this clear-eyed labour of love will send readers back to the rest of John Cheever’s considerable body of work.
Relax. This is a critical commentary, not an extension of the author’s earlier memoir of her father. Slices of biography are served but sparingly; and Susan Cheever WAS there when her father’s work was being prepared. Commendably, her aim is to inform and deepen, not scold and restrict.
That takes some nobility. That John Cheever was an alcoholic, snobbish, bad-tempered, walking disaster area has been well known since the publication of his journals and letters in the early 90s. It seems he over-achieved in sulking. During a stay in a drying-out facility - one of many - he would use his allotted calls to telephone his adult daughter at work (forty ‘blocks’ away) to loose torrents of molten self-pity. He wasn’t being treated like a feted writer but like a common soaker! Worse, they made fun of his…accent! (Imagine the voice of the dodgy mayor from The Simpsons and you’ve got it.)
How such muddled human beings spin their lives into art is an enduring mystery, treated here with a careful balance of candour, respect, and room for awe.
We learn the career-defining The Stories of John Cheever was really the swan-song of that career, largely intended as a cash-in following the unexpected success of Falconer. Grouping the stories together and publishing them was the brainchild of Cheever’s editor, not the author, who had an almost pathological fear of revisiting the past. The stories’ order was also the editor’s doing; they were not, in fact, presented chronologically, but frequently moved around in compositional time to better vary the artist’s programme.
Susan was something of an artist’s model for many of the children in Cheever’s stories. It seems the seedy underbelly of the Cheever family was displayed so frequently in the pages of The New Yorker that the latter seemed more like a literary version of National Geographic. This has its funny moments. One tea-spraying moment comes when ‘The Country Husband’ comes up for analysis:
The story seems freer and richer than the previous stories, and the dinner table argument—a classic-goes on for two pages in which Louisa and Henry go at it while Francis Weed does everything wrong. Weed then goes upstairs and finds his older daughter flopped down in bed reading a sleazy magazine, True Romance. I did read a lot of gossip magazines, but this happened to be some soft-core porn that I had sent away for from an ad.
The story, for many Cheever’s greatest, was written to buy braces for his daughter, and with much complaint from the author about this fact. The result - a story that sweeps from death to life to wanting to shag the babysitter to visions of men in golden mail riding elephants - is masterful. Susan is not being facetious when she says she is proud to have had the crooked teeth that inspired the story - and few will disbelieve her. Good writing, after all, does not require pure intentions.
Susan is alert to aspects of Cheever’s work that others miss. When a Cheever story starts with contempt, she notes, it inevitably ends in fear, as in ‘The Angel of the Bridge.’ While the stories carefully paint the pastel watercolors of the suburbs, she argues, they frequently descend into horror, and the road there is lit by the energy of illicit sex and unwanted desires. The early masterpiece ‘The Enormous Radio’ introduces a surreal note, with its radio that magically picks up neighbours conversations and their deepest secrets. Susan also perceptively notes that what most people miss about ‘The Swimmer’, a surreal tale in which the seasons change in a single afternoon, is the story’s ending.
Usefully, the book reprints the stories under discussion at the back end - and all are well chosen. I am pleased to see ‘The Housebreaker of Shady Hill’ included here, not least because Julian Barnes’s recent selection unaccountably excluded it. In a just world, this clear-eyed labour of love will send readers back to the rest of John Cheever’s considerable body of work.
November 7, 2025
Good books are like good concerts. After the concert's over, you have a greater appreciation of the band. You want to listen to them on the car ride home. You want to put them on repeat for the next month or so. "When All the Men Wore Hats" made me want to immerse myself in the whole Cheever universe, and it's a big universe. As Susan Cheever points out, there are of course the stories, the novels, the biographies, her own earlier memoir, plus "The Swimmer" was made into a movie and spawned an entire free swimming movement, Cheever inspired "Mad Men," which basically gave prestige TV its start. There's the new show, "Your Friends and Neighbors," etc. I've gone through a Cheever addiction in the past, reading some of the short stories, some of the novels, and the Blake Bailey biography, but I feel like it's time for another fix. Susan Cheever plays a role in this story but not an intrusive one. She was the author's daughter--it would be weird if she didn't insert her own thoughts and opinions into this book. But it isn't really a shared biography. I would almost call it an "appreciation" of the author. Susan Cheever starts each chapter by quoting from one of her father's stories and tying it in some way to his life, but as she points out, he was cagey about his writing process and quick to shoot down any efforts to connect his work to his biography. More than anything, "When All the Men Wore Hats" draws out John Cheever's many contradictions. He was a teacher who hated school and teachers himself. He was a patrician without much money. He was a closeted gay man living as a husband and father in McCarthy era suburbia. He was a bohemian artist who donned a suit and tie to go to work every day. Seems like it was these terrible conflicts raging within Cheever that led him to alcoholism. He was the prototypical hard-drinking, hard-smoking midcentury New Yorker writer. Susan Cheever ably points out that his fiction was much more than that, and some of his best stories were actually spurned (at least at first) by the New Yorker, including his classic "The Swimmer." He had a magic realist bent that the magazine wasn't quite ready for. John Cheever wasn't a saint. He could be mean and biting. But this isn't his daughter's revenge. She truly seemed to love her father and his writing. If anything, I felt sadness at the end for a man who was never really able to be his truest self. He was such an amazing writer that I do wonder what kind of work he was capable of if unconstrained by money worries or social norms. I'd like to think there would've been more wildly experimental stories.
September 28, 2025
What a beautiful and tender memoir/literary criticism from Susan Cheever. What she writes here is generous, forgiving, and compassionate toward the complicated person who was her father. There is still a hint of hurt here, as well. It gives her story piquancy. This book has more to say about John Cheever and his legacy than Susan Cheever's last memoir about him. As I read "When All the Men Wore Hats," Susan Cheever's previous memoir, "Home Before Dark," still lingered in my mind. While I can easily give "When All the Men Wore Hats" all five stars for its extraordinary mix of biography and literary criticism, I would have liked it all the more if she had waited to write about her father--waited until she was ready to write such a wise and expansive book as this one.
October 29, 2025
A journey through The Stories of John Cheever written by his daughter Susan Cheever. Full of literary insights, personal insights, and honesty and compassion. Short stories are sometimes viewed as “ practice “ for the true literary trophey of a complete novel. John Cheever was one writer who turned this idea on its head. Here we can admire the gems he wrote as explored and contextualized by his daughter. Outstanding balance between the literary and the personal is achieved by Susan Cheever in this book.
June 27, 2025
A must for Cheever fans -- what a delight it is to be able to get a new perspective on the old stories.
Like many readers nowadays, I came to his work via the collected stories + his published letters. And now, to be able to see even more clearly the links between his real life, his family, and what he wrote is a gift indeed.
Like many readers nowadays, I came to his work via the collected stories + his published letters. And now, to be able to see even more clearly the links between his real life, his family, and what he wrote is a gift indeed.
November 1, 2025
If you enjoy the stories of John Cheever and wish to read a literary study of them that is also biographical, then this is the book. It is serious and discerning, and fondly provides a personal context to the beautiful stories. Six of his stories are included. The Swimmer is one of the greatest stories of the last century.
November 10, 2025
I read a couple of his short stories collections and enjoyed them. Getting to know the writer through a family member is always telling. He is a writer worth reading if you like short stories.
November 9, 2025
Novelist and historian Susan Cheever, at age 82, transcends the modern epithet of nepo baby. She is the daughter of writer John Cheever (1912-1982), who was a virtuoso of what has come to be known (sometimes dismissively) as The New Yorker short story. Her new book, her seventeenth, When All the Men Wore Hats, is an engrossing study of her father’s life and art as seen through the lens of his stories. There’s an appendix with six of them, including “The Swimmer” (1964), cited often as John Cheever’s masterpiece, and still astonishing for its brevity—under twenty pages—and its poolside cocktail party that morphs unexpectedly into The Odyssey. The protagonist, Ned Merrill, an adman and bogus optimist, challenges himself to swim home by traversing the backyard pools of his suburban neighbors, scales falling from his eyes with every stroke.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews