Cheever: A Life (Part 2 of 2 parts)

by Blake Bailey, Malcolm Hillgartner

(This is Part 2 of a 2 part cassette edition) Here is, for the first time, the full and unforgettable life of John Cheever (1912-1982), written with unprecedented access to essential sources. Cheever was a soul in conflict, a high-school dropout who published his first story at eighteen, a dire alcoholic who recovered to write the great novel Falconer, a secret bisexual who struggled with his longings and his fierce homophobia, whose groundbreaking work landed him on the covers of Time and Newsweek, a man who believed in the power of family love and sexual pleasure, a man whose desperate loneliness was never wholly offset by his faith in the joy of creation.

9 pages, Audio Cassette

First published March 3, 2009

About the author

Blake Bailey is the author of biographies of Philip Roth, John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and a finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Prizes. His 2014 book, The Splendid Things We Planned, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.