When All the Men Wore Hats
Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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.
The Stories of John Cheever, published in 1978, brought together some of the finest short fiction ever written. The collection was honored with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and it would go on to sell millions of copies and to define the American short story and shape generations of writers. Cheever’s chronicles of modern life both emerged from a distinctly American culture and also created it—inspiring everything from Mad Men to a Raymond Carver story, from rock songs to a Seinfeld episode.
Growing up, Susan Cheever, John Cheever’s eldest child and only daughter, read what he read, heard what he heard, bantered and gossiped with him and her brothers and mother at the dinner table, and later 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 his writing.
In When All the Men Wore Hats, Susan Cheever 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”? In her 1984 book Home Before Dark, published two years after her father’s death, Cheever wrote movingly about her father and the secrets he kept, but here, years later, she tells the story of the remarkable stories themselves, six of which appear in full in the book’s appendix.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cheever, the daughter of novelist and short story writer John Cheever (1912–1982), blends literary analysis and memoir in this transcendent look at her father's most influential works. Married with three children, John was a closeted gay man who battled alcoholism for most of his life. Despite his prolific output—he published more than 100 stories in the New Yorker between 1935 and 1982, plus three mid-career novels—his family was burdened by financial worries until the success of the novel Falconer in 1977 and his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, The Stories of John Cheever, in 1978. Those stories, though celebrated, plundered the family's personal lives and frequently savaged their neighbors and friends; Cheever writes that her father was "a wise man on the page and an idiot at the dinner table," never quite able to extend the empathy he showed his characters to the people in his life. John's emotional struggles, meanwhile, went unexamined within the family, "but what was left unsaid... often leaked out into the pages of the New Yorker." Simultaneously a tribute to her father and an exposé of his failings, Cheever's narrative offers bittersweet grace to a man whose life was a kind of fiction and whose fiction drew mercilessly from his life. It's equal parts wrenching and edifying. Agents: Andrew Wylie and Rebecca Nagel, Wylie Agency.
