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About This Item
New York: Knopf, 2009. First Edition . First USA Edition. Fine book in a Fine Dust Jacket. A detailed and fair biography of the great American short story writer. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Award for Biography. Blake Bailey has also edited the LIbrary of America Omnibus of Cheever's work.
Synopsis
From the acclaimed author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates comes the unforgettable life of John Cheever (1912--1982), a man who spent much of his career impersonating a perfect suburban gentleman, the better to become one of the foremost chroniclers of postwar America. "I was born into no true class," Cheever mused in his journal, "and it was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously." Written with unprecedented access to essential sources--including Cheever's massive journal, only a fraction of which has ever been published--Blake Bailey's biography reveals the troubled but strangely lovable man behind the disguises, an artist who delighted in the everyday radiance of the world while yearning, above all, "to be illustrious."Cheever's was a soul in conflict: he was a proud Yankee who flaunted his lineage while deploring the provincialism of his Quincy, Massachusetts, family circle; a high-school dropout who published his first story at eighteen; a pioneer of suburban realist fiction who continually pushed the boundaries of realism; a dire alcoholic who recovered to write the great novel Falconer; a secret bisexual who struggled with his longings and his fierce homophobia in a revolving door of self-loathing and hedonism. We see a man who concealed his anxieties behind the mask of a genial Westchester squire--a paterfamilias in Brooks Brothers clothes whose world was peopled by legendary writers and beautiful women (Malcolm Cowley, Saul Bellow, William Maxwell, Hope Lange, and John Updike, among them); whose groundbreaking work landed him on the covers of Time and Newsweek; a man whose demons and desperation were never quite vanquished by the joy he found in his work.Blake Bailey has written a luminous biography, a revelation of a writer of timeless fiction and of the man behind the page.From the Hardcover edition.
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Details
- Bookseller
- MDS Books
(CA)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 000467
- Title
- Cheever
- Author
- Blake Bailey
- Book Condition
- Used
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Edition
- First Edition
- Publisher
- Knopf
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 2009
Terms of Sale
MDS Books
30 day return guarantee, with full refund including original shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.
About the Seller
MDS Books
Biblio member since 2013
Mississauga, Ontario
About MDS Books
Modern First Editions, Fiction, Poetry.
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Fair
- is a worn book that has complete text pages (including those with maps or plates) but may lack endpapers, half-title, etc....
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
- Fine
- A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...
- First Edition
- In book collecting, the first edition is the earliest published form of a book. A book may have more than one first edition in...
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