John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and he went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1978 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer prize. Shortly before his death in 1982 he was awarded the National Medal for Literature.
A whole swathe of poor and underprivileged America is evoked by one of the country's most rarified stylists -- James Wood One of the most important novels of our time.. Read it and be ennobled * New York Times * Splendid...it is rough, it is elegant, it is pure. It is also indispensable, if you earnestly desire to know what is happening to the human soul in the USA. -- Saul Bellow One of our truly fine writers...Moving and excellent * Washington Post *