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John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is "now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century."〔''Contemporary Literary Criticism'', ("John Cheever Criticism" ). Enotes.com. Accessed 20 February 2010.〕 While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including "The Enormous Radio", "Goodbye, My Brother", "The Five-Forty-Eight", "The Country Husband", and "The Swimmer"), he also wrote four novels, comprising ''The Wapshot Chronicle'' (National Book Award, 1958),〔 ("National Book Awards – 1958" ). National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-14. (With essay by Neil Baldwin () from the Awards 50-year anniversary publications and from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)〕 ''The Wapshot Scandal'' (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), ''Bullet Park'' (1969), ''Falconer'' (1977) and a novella ''Oh What a Paradise It Seems'' (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both – light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the ''Wapshot'' novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, ''The Stories of John Cheever'', won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award.〔 ("National Book Awards – 1981" ). National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-14. With essays by Willie Perdomo, Matthew Pitt, and Robert Wilder from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog. 〕〔 Cheever's ''Stories'' won the 1981 award for paperback Fiction. From 1980 to 1983 in National Book Awards history there were dual hardcover and paperback awards in most categories. Most of the paperback award-winners were reprints, including this one.〕 On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library of America. ==Early life and education== John William Cheever was the second child of Frederick Lincoln Cheever and Mary Liley Cheever. His father was a prosperous shoe salesman and Cheever spent much of his childhood in a large Victorian house, at 123 Winthrop Avenue,〔Susan Cheever, ''Home Before Dark: A Personal Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter'' (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 84.〕 in the then-genteel suburb of Wollaston, Massachusetts. In the mid-1920s, however, as the New England shoe and textile industries began their long decline, Frederick Cheever lost most of his money and began to drink heavily. To pay the bills, Mary Cheever opened a gift shop in downtown Quincy—an "abysmal humiliation" for the family, as John saw it.〔From Cheever's unpublished journal, on deposit at Houghton Library, Harvard University.〕 In 1926, Cheever began attending Thayer Academy, a private day school, but he found the atmosphere stifling and performed poorly, finally transferring to Quincy High in 1928. A year later he won a short story contest sponsored by the ''Boston Herald'' and was invited back to Thayer as a "special student" on academic probation. His grades continued to be poor, however, and, in March 1930, he was either expelled for smoking or (more likely) departed of his own accord when the headmaster delivered an ultimatum to the effect that he must either apply himself or leave. The eighteen-year-old Cheever wrote a sardonic account of this experience, "Expelled," which was subsequently published in ''The New Republic.''〔Jon () Cheever, "Expelled," ''The New Republic'', October 1, 1930, 171–4.〕 Around this time, Cheever's older brother Fred, forced to withdraw from Dartmouth in 1926 because of the family's financial crisis, re-entered his life "when the situation was most painful and critical," as John later wrote. After the 1932 crash of Kreuger & Toll, in which Frederick Cheever had invested what was left of his money, the Cheever house on Winthrop Avenue was lost to foreclosure. The parents separated, while John and Fred took an apartment together on Beacon Hill, in Boston. In 1933, John wrote to Elizabeth Ames, the director of the Yaddo artist's colony in Saratoga Springs, New York: "The idea of leaving the city," he said, "has never been so distant or desirable."〔''The Letters of John Cheever'', ed. Benjamin Cheever (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 33.〕 Ames denied his first application, but offered him a place the following year, whereupon Cheever decided to sever his "ungainly attachment" to his brother. Cheever spent the summer of 1934 at Yaddo, which would serve as a second home for much of his life. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「John Cheever」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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