The biographer Blake Bailey knows there’s nothing more invigorating in the world than a proper comeback story, and he’s hoping that pretty soon he’ll have a new one to tell about John Cheever, a writer he believes has been denied his rightful place in the canon of postwar American literature.
Mr. Read More
Cheever
By Blake Bailey
Alfred A. Knopf, 770 pages, $35
John Cheever was inordinately fond of the word “inestimable”: It shows up twice in the brief preface to The Stories of John Cheever (1978), the best seller that pushed him at last to the top of the heap (he was now king of the short Read More
A long out-of-print short story by John Cheever that was first published in the 1943 collection The Way Some People Live will appear in serialized form next week at the Web site FiveChapters.com.
The story, which is included in a forthcoming Library of America collection, is called “Of Love: A Testimony.” It Read More
A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates , by Blake Bailey. Picador, 675 pages, $35.
The real horror in reading any biography, whether it be a doorstop paean to a President or the brief life of a saint, is the subject’s dogged persistence in being, well, himself. This is partly a Read More
