File this one under "Everything going according to plan."

Less than a month after the publication of a hefty, definitive biography of John Cheever sparked widespread reconsiderations of the late author’s work, the flagship imprint of Simon & Schuster has confirmed plans to reissue a long out-of-print letters collection edited by Cheever’s son Ben that was originally published in 1988.

The biography, written by Blake Bailey and published with much fanfare by Knopf, was accompanied by a two-tome Library of America edition of Cheever’s stories and novels; together, the two publications added up to a deliberate, carefully choreographed full-court press intended to establish Cheever as a giant of postwar American fiction on the level of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. As Mr. Bailey told us in a recent interview, "I hope it will be contagious."

Simon & Schuster spokeswoman Victoria Meyer said in an email that the new edition of the letters collection will be published in October as a trade paperback, and will not include any material that was not already in the original book. She described the volume as "an intimate self-portrait of the literary icon, as revealed through his prolific correspondence with famous writers, his wife, children, friends, and lovers," and noted that it includes an "elegiac but never idealistic" introduction written by Ben Cheever as well as contextual "explanatory notes" peppered throughout.

Ms. Meyer said that Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal had ordered the reissue "because of the renewed interest in Cheever's life."

Mr. Bailey greeted the news happily yesterday, saying in an email that he is "thrilled to hear" about it.

Could there be more Cheever reissues coming in the wake of Mr. Bailey’s biography? Might HarperCollins, which owns the rights to Cheever's first two novels, The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal, and published handsome paperback editions of both in 2003, be moved to get in on the action?

Not at the moment, said Alberto Rojas, a spokesman for HC's paperback operation, Harper Perennial.

"We'll ask stores to take in our stock and display it with the new titles," Mr. Rojas told The Observer, but there are no plans to do anything more.  

Mr. Bailey has just published a long, intense biography of Cheever with Knopf, concisely titled Cheever: A Life, and has edited two handsome volumes of his collected works issued earlier this month by the Library of America. Between the two publications, Mr. Bailey hopes to provoke a full-scale revival of interest that will acquit Cheever of the charge that he was merely a skillful but conventional writer of New Yorker short stories, and to restore him to the level of esteem he enjoyed toward the end of his life, when his final novel, Falconer, landed him on the cover of Newsweek, and a best-selling collection of his finest short stories was published by Knopf and awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

“Cheever was pretty much sui generis and that’s one of the reasons that posterity has not been kind to him,” Mr. Bailey said recently. “As I say in my book, it’s very hard to fit Cheever into a niche. He’s very chameleonic.”

Robert Gottlieb, who compiled the prizewinning story collection while serving as Cheever’s editor at Knopf, said in an interview that some of Cheever’s work is closer to magic realism than anything else. “The accepted, easy version of Cheever was that he was a chronicler of suburban life,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “But none of the novels are that. The Wapshot books are one kind of different thing, and Bullet Park and Falconer are another kind of different thing. But none of them is The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Yet that’s how he was thought of, partly because The New Yorker was that kind of magazine.”

Mr. Gottlieb went on: “He’s an odd figure because in his day, going back to before I was involved with him, everybody knew he was important and good. But where to place him? Where did he rank? Was he up to Bellow? Was he a gentile Roth? How did he compare with Updike? … When he died, as often happens, his fame sort of slid away with the obituaries. The stories went on selling in Vintage, but I think all of us had a nagging feeling that attention wasn’t being paid to a major American writer.”

In the comeback story Mr. Bailey is hoping to orchestrate, Cheever is rescued from obscurity by a motivated, ambitious biographer whose rigorous and serious study of the writer’s life and work compels literary scholars to reassess him and finally put him on their syllabi alongside certified postwar giants like the ones Mr. Gottlieb mentioned.

It’s a feat, but Mr. Bailey actually succeed in pulling off something similar once before, with 2003’s A Tragic Honesty, his definitive biography of Richard Yates, another American writer who had come in death to hold the reputation of a conventional craftsman who was popular in his time with middlebrow readers but irrelevant today. Mr. Bailey’s biography, broadly praised to the heavens by critics upon publication, unmistakably contributed to a resurgence of interest in Yates’ work and led, however indirectly, to his 1961 novel Revolutionary Road being adapted into a Hollywood film and subsequently appearing on the New York Times best-seller list.

“I don’t want to toot my own horn, but what’s happened to Richard Yates is simply incredible,” Mr. Bailey said recently. “When I first proposed the biography [in 1999] every single one of Richard Yates’ books was out of print, even Revolutionary Road. … Suddenly there are a million copies of Revolutionary Road in print. So that’s a pretty full-blown Yates revival.”

After turning in the Yates manuscript to his editor in 2002, Mr. Bailey “dithered around” in search of a new project, having decided that he definitely didn’t want to write another literary biography. The story of how he ended up doing just that begins over lunch at a French bistro in Westchester, when John Cheever’s son Ben spotted a newspaper editor he’d been writing for with a galley copy of A Tragic Honesty. That editor, FiveChapters.com founder Dave Daley (who serialized the early short Cheever story “Of Love: A Testimony” on his Web site in February), recommended the book to Ben, who in turn brought it to the attention of his wife, New York Times book critic Janet Maslin, and interviewed Mr. Bailey on his cable access talk show. A few months after a glowing review of the book by Ms. Maslin appeared in The Times (“Blake Bailey’s great, perceptive, heartbreaking Yates biography is a landmark event”), Ben invited Mr. Bailey to dinner, and let him know he’d be happy if the author did for his father what he’d done for Richard Yates. 

AFTER SOME INITIAL resistance—he had it in his head that he didn’t want to write about someone who’d already been written about, and a Cheever biography had already been published, in 1988—Mr. Bailey agreed to the project, and before long, he was conducting interviews and combing through the astonishing amount of material that Cheever left behind in his personal journals.

The question now that his book is in stores is, can Mr. Bailey repeat with Cheever the success he had with Yates? What must happen in order for the revival he has undertaken to really come off? 

According to Deborah Garrison, Mr. Bailey’s editor at Knopf, the first step has been to secure coverage from longtime admirers of Cheever who have been waiting for an occasion to testify to his greatness.

“People who are writers love Cheever and revere him,” Ms. Garrison said. “They have learned from him, and for them, it’s this chance to stand up and give back a little bit. There are people who want to help in the Cheever revival because they think he has a rightful place in the canon, and now’s the moment.”

“So far, so good,” Mr. Bailey said of his book’s coverage on Monday morning as he sat down to breakfast at a midtown bistro across the street from the Random House building.

He read aloud from the rave review he had received on the cover of the forthcoming issue of The New York Times Book Review. Mr. Bailey had underlined the parts he liked best on his xeroxed copy of the piece, including the ending, where the reviewer, Geoffrey Wolff, calls the book “wise and serious” and “so human.” Mr. Bailey, who worked on his 770-page beast of a book for almost six years before submitting his final draft, laughed with happiness as he said the words.

The Times review was the second really terrific piece of publicity to appear in support of Mr. Bailey’s Cheever campaign. The first was a 5,000-word feature in The New York Times Magazine in which Chip McGrath, who briefly edited Cheever at The New Yorker during the late 1970s, proclaimed that by writing his biography and editing the accompanying Library of America editions, Mr. Bailey had afforded an unfairly forgotten master his “best chance, and maybe his last one for a while, to join the ranks of the great 20th-century American writers.”

Mr. McGrath, evidently eager to be playing a role in the effort, was visiting Mr. Bailey at his home in Norfolk, Va., when word came from the Times newsroom that John Updike, the man whom Cheever might have considered his closest competitor, had died of lung cancer. The unexpected news compelled Mr. McGrath to cut his trip with Mr. Bailey short and return to New York to help with the coverage.

As it happened, Updike had written a review of Mr. Bailey’s book for The New Yorker shortly before he died. It was not the kindest appraisal (Updike wrote that despite Mr. Bailey’s “thorough research and unblinkered appraisal,” the book had “smothered” what few “glimmers of grace and well-being” there were in Cheever’s tormented life), but in Mr. Bailey’s view, the piece is just one setback on a growing list of unqualified triumphs that, just a few days into the Cheever biography’s published life, already includes enthusiastic and affectionate reviews from the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor and many others.   

“So far the critical reception is very satisfactory,” Mr. Bailey said. “Most of the appraisals are serious and closely argued. I’m a little perturbed by sort of the rote positions that journalistic hacks take—like ‘the stories are good, the novels aren’t,’ that sort of thing—but … for the most part the tone has been that, ‘this man’s work will endure. This man’s work is too great not to endure.’”

“I THINK THE WORK speaks for itself,” Mr. Bailey said in an interview back in January, when asked whom he thinks he needs to convince for the Cheever revival to really happen. “The people in the critical establishment and in the academic establishment have to take that seriously. Whether they embrace Cheever’s work or not, they have to take it seriously.”

Whether they do or not could make all the difference. As Library of America publisher Max Rudin put it, “Literary reputations require an investment of energy on someone’s part,” and for literary writers that usually means being taught in college classrooms and written about in dissertations—something that has not really happened in Cheever’s case.

One reason for this, according to Timothy Aubry, an assistant professor of English at Baruch College who wrote about Cheever in his dissertation and is currently at work on a book about middlebrow literature, is that Cheever’s work doesn’t lend itself to the scholarly preoccupations that have dominated literary studies in the United States since World War II.

“There have been two major kinds of contemporary fiction that have received the majority of attention in the academy since the 1950s,” Mr. Aubry said. “One is the postmodern experimental meta-fictional kind of stuff, like John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Barthelme … and the other is ethnic literature.”

Cheever, Mr. Aubry said, “doesn’t fit into either of them. He’s kind of slipped through the cracks.” 

Columbia English professor Ross Posnock, who teaches an undergraduate survey course on postwar American literature, said he feels guilty about leaving writers like Cheever off his syllabus, but must because of time constraints.

“He’s not on my canon list. Why? I guess not influential enough, not important enough,” Mr. Posnock said. “He’s considered a distinguished writer, but not a commanding figure. You can put all sorts of cynical or idealistic glosses on it-- ‘he just doesn’t fit into the narratives professors want to spin,’ or ‘he doesn’t fit into the race-gender-class scenario they’re trying to peddle’—or, maybe there’s just a general consensus about his aesthetic limits that isn’t as insidious.”

“Blake Bailey is right in some respects,” he added. “What English professors teach does have influence, because they teach thousands of students in a lifetime and these people are influenced by who they read.... I think if I was Blake Bailey I would also be frustrated at the lack of prestige that Cheever has in the academy. But he should take solace in the fact that his book will bring a lot of readers to Cheever.”

At Knopf, head of academic marketing Keith Goldsmith said he is anticipating a two-year outreach campaign to “get Cheever back on the map for literature courses,” one that involves advertising at conferences and liberally distributing free copies of the biography to professors.

“The stories get adopted a lot, but it tends to be in creative writing programs,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “The sort of attention he has not received is as a writer to be appreciated from a critical point of view. We’re really hoping that with Blake’s new biography, more serious scholars will take a look at Cheever’s work and begin teaching it to students of literature rather than just using it in M.F.A. programs.”

Mr. Bailey clearly wants this to happen as well, but worries that academics may still miss the finer points of Cheever’s work.

“While other fiction writers appreciate and revere the work of Richard Yates and John Cheever and understand the difficulties of achieving that level of craft, I don’t think that academics have the same capacity for that kind of aesthetic appreciation of a writer’s work,” he said. “They tend to look for sociocultural significance and theoretical characterizations, and those are essentially beside the point when it comes to a great writer’s work.”

Whether the Cheever revival reaches Yatesian proportions, Mr. Bailey will know he’s done all he could.

“Anyone can read Cheever and be intellectually and spiritually replenished by the experience,” Mr. Bailey said. “So I think people are going to know that. I hope so. You can only write a good biography, bring out the Library of America edition, and beyond that, I don’t know what one man can do. That’s about it.”

“I hope it will be contagious,” he added later. “I have tried hard to sell Cheever. And if this doesn’t work-- if a big Knopf biography, with the publicity apparatus of Knopf behind it, does not sell an enduring Cheever revival, then I don’t know what will.”

neyfakh@observer.com

“I think it’s fine that Bill Faulkner got the Nobel Prize. … The Nobel Prize is like that purse they give in Verona for the shot who bags the most sitting ducks on a clear day. There are other kinds of shooting, but they don’t give prizes for it. There is the kind of shooting that you get in the Abruzzi in the May snows and underwater shooting and the kind of lonely shooting that you have when you take your sights in a pocket-mirror and bring down a grizzly over your left shoulder but they don’t give prizes for that kind of shooting. Mr. Thomas Hardy and Mr. Herman Melville did that kind of shooting but they never got any prizes.”

The parody, please note, precedes by five years Hemingway’s own Nobel prize. As far as I know, there’s no record of Cheever’s reaction to Hemingway as laureate—no pastiche of Faulkner dissing Papa—though I like to think he would have used the phrase “outraged disbelief.”

JOHN UPDIKE’s last review for The New Yorker (March 9, $4.99)—an unwelcome thought on all counts—was of Mr. Bailey’s Cheever biography. Though he hailed Mr. Bailey’s book as “a triumph of thorough research and unblinkered appraisal,” Updike also made it clear that he found the task of reading at length about Cheever’s unhappiness a fearsome burden. Who can blame him? He was already gravely ill with the cancer that would kill him only weeks later.

How amazing, then, to find that the review, though written under a death sentence, is dotted with phrases charged with the signature Updike élan. About Cheever’s journals, for instance: “an embarrassment of riches and a richesse of embarrassment.” About Cheever’s closeted homosexuality: “Repression and expression: twin causes of complication and disharmony with others.” And again: “There was, between his shadowy ‘proclivities’ and his luminous work, an almost organic disconnect.”

Updike’s professionalism has always been a source of wonder to me—the furious work rate; the invariably high standard of the vast oeuvre; the impeccable, universal civility—but this last instance of his devotion to his craft tops it all. Hats off.

THE BRILLIANT and mischievous Hilary Mantel, musing in The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) about the famous moment when Coleridge, in the midst of composing “Kubla Khan,” was interrupted “by a person on business from Porlock,” admits to herself that most writers have occasion to pray for the diversion of an interruption, especially when they know they’re ready to start writing:

“The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticize them later. You give this advice but can’t always take it. You dread setting off down any one narrative path, because you know your choice will make most of the others impossible. Select one, write it, and it begins to seem in some sense pre-ordained, natural, correct; the other options fade from memory. Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing. Writers, as generations of jealous spouses have learned to their cost, are not naturally monogamous. We don’t want to choose; we want to keep open all the possibilities, fill a lifetime with fresh and less-than-final versions.”

I’m particularly sensitive to those remarks because I’m about to embark on a daunting project (a biography of the heroic John Updike, no less), which will interrupt, for a couple of years, the writing of the Bookie. I’m grateful to The Observer for generously allowing me to take an extended sabbatical—and I hope no one suspects that I signed up to write the book merely to avoid a weekly deadline!

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 story, while Saul Bellow ruled over the novel); and again in the first story of the collection, “Goodbye, My Brother,” written in 1950, when Cheever was not yet 40:

“Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eyes in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless?”

He liked the word and the word suits him: There’s something inestimable about his work, a magic that defies measurement. And the sorrow and loneliness of his inner life—that, too, is inestimable, even though all the relevant information is now on the table: Blake Bailey’s definitive biography, Cheever (no one will ever want to know more about this particular life), and the two-volume Library of America edition of Cheever’s work (edited by Mr. Bailey). Posterity will make its judgment about his place in the canon; meanwhile, we can admire a prodigious and mysterious achievement—and contemplate, for as long as we can bear, the misery from which it sprung.

“RARELY HAS A GIFTED and creative life seemed sadder,” wrote John Updike when The Journals of John Cheever were published in 1991, nine years after the author’s death. Before that we’d been privy to The Letters of John Cheever (1988), edited by his son Ben, and Home Before Dark (1984), a frank memoir by his daughter, Susan. The combination of those three volumes should have prepared us for a uniquely depressing life story—and yet it’s still a shock to realize, halfway through Mr. Bailey’s biography, that the grimness will not abate, that the successful writer who in 1964 has his face on the cover of Time magazine (“Ovid in Ossining”), the genial and charming John Cheever with his famous “childlike sense of wonder,” is desperately unhappy and destined to become more so.

Already in 1964, during what he had to admit was an “extraordinary run of luck,” he was drinking heavily before any public appearance, so as to keep a smile fixed on his face—“and afterward,” Mr. Bailey writes, “he felt so ashamed of himself that he drank more.” Cheever confided in his journal: “I feel like a remorseful masturbator holding his aching, softening cock in one hand while sperm runs down the wall paper like the white of an egg.” Yes, that is the tone of his intimate confessions, which is one reason why I chose to quote that passage, another being that it links his shyness, his remorse, his sexuality and his drinking—four demons that tormented him for most of his life.

Loneliness and alienation were the keynotes of his dismal childhood in Quincy, Mass., and his sense of his own isolation persisted into his 20s, when he was a hungry young writer in Depression-era New York. “The thing I miss most,” he wrote, “is an ability to identify myself with a group.” You would have thought that marriage in 1941 to the long-suffering Mary Winternitz would begin to heal the rift, and that the birth of his first child in 1943 would finish the job. No such luck. A year after he’d settled his young family into a suburban enclave in Westchester, Cheever wrote in his journal, “Every indifferent glance, every back turned by chance, every hint of indifference, real or imagined, sinks into my breast like an arrow dipped in poison.” In fact, his new role as a family man only made matters worse. Despite his yearning for a “Norman Rockwell image,” he thought of himself as “a pariah—a small dirty fraud … a spiritual and sexual impostor.”

Ah, yes—the matter of what he called his “contested sexual identity.” “[F]lesh lusteth contrary to the spirit”—that, writes Mr. Bailey, is “surely the major theme of Cheever’s work as well as his life.” To put it bluntly, Cheever had sex with boys as a boy and with men as a young man. He seems to have desisted for the first 20 years of his marriage, but temptation (the promptings of his “wayward cock”) plagued him: “If I followed my instincts, I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.”

And when he did eventually succumb, he was “consumed,” according to Mr. Bailey, “with an almost suicidal self-loathing.” The vicious cycle that persisted for at least three decades spins roughly like this: His dread of being found out—exposed as an impostor—drove him to drink, which led to impotence and undermined his marriage, which drove him to drink, with the same result or worse. And so on.

IT'S TOO NEAT TO suggest, as Cheever himself did, that his “contested” sexuality could be sublimated in his writing (“I know my troubled nature and have tried to contain it along creative lines”). When Cheever discovered in the late ’70s that a literary scholar had written a dissertation in which the author’s secret bisexuality unlocks the hidden meaning of his work, Cheever mocked the notion in his journal with withering sarcasm: “In order to conceal my homosexuality I married, made my wife miserable and bitter and finally rose to greatness in my last novel [Falconer] by admitting my love for cock.”

For me, the experience of reading Cheever is not appreciably enhanced by an intimate familiarity with the sordid details of his romps with men (and women), or by learning that his libido remained rampant even when he was terminally ill with cancer (in Mr. Bailey, oddly, this information “excites awe and even a trace of envy”). Nor does it help to have followed day by day the arc of his worsening alcoholism, which reached its nadir in 1975, when he very nearly succeeded in drinking himself into a shabby grave. (“I keep reading biographies of Fitzgerald,” Cheever wrote in the sodden mid-60s, “and I always get to bawling at the end.”)

Mr. Bailey’s research is impeccable and exhaustive—a mighty feat, though sometimes a mixed blessing for a reader oppressed by the weight of stubborn fact and the ticktock march of seamless chronology. Fortunately, Mr. Bailey’s encyclopedic knowledge of the particulars of Cheever’s unhappiness has not clouded his appreciation of Cheever’s writing; the commentary on the work is judicious and nuanced.

I also admired the confident sketches of a large and fascinating supporting cast, among them Malcolm Cowley, William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, Updike and Allan Gurganus. Harold Brodkey makes a couple of cameo appearances, and earns this memorable Cheever put-down: “I think of Brodkey in St. Louis, falling in love with himself because there was no one else so intelligent handsome and rich in the neighborhood; and how bitter this marriage was.” (Lines like that show off the brilliance of the journals—that massive monument, to borrow Mr. Bailey’s phrase, “of tragicomic solipsism.”)

AS IF THE LIFE weren’t sad enough, Mr. Bailey delivers in his epilogue dispiriting news of slumping sales figures: Cheever isn’t read much these days. One hopes that this biography and the Library of America edition will spark a revival.

Sorrow and hope, joy and bleakest despair—Cheever was a virtuoso when it came to hitting the high and low notes of the human scale, sometimes in dazzlingly tight sequence. (Think of “The Swimmer” and the extraordinary emotional landscape Neddy Merrill traverses on his aquatic cross-county journey.)

Let me leave you with a little taste (also aquatic: Cheever loved the water), a typical New Yorker story from 1959, “The Golden Age,” about Seton, a television writer who wishes he were a poet and has brought his family to a seaside village in Italy—“because he wants to lead a more illustrious life”:

“He dives, and swims through a school of transparent fish, and farther down, where the water is dark and cold, he sees a large octopus eye him wickedly, gather up its members, and slip into a cave paved with white flowers. There, at the edge of the cave he sees a Greek vase, an amphora. He dives for it, feels the rough clay on his fingers, and goes up for air. He dives again and again, and finally brings the vase triumphantly into the light. It is a plump form with a narrow neck and two small handles. The neck is looped with a scarf of darker clay. It is broken nearly in two. Such vases, and vases much finer, are often found along that coast, and if they are of no value they stand on the shelves of the café, the bakery, and the barbershop, but the value of this one to Seton is inestimable—as if the fact that a television writer could reach into the Mediterranean and bring up a Greek vase were a hopeful cultural omen, proof of his own worthiness.”

Adam Begley is at work on a biography of John Updike. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

The story, which is included in a forthcoming Library of America collection, is called "Of Love: A Testimony." It came to Dave Daley, the editor of FiveChapters.com, by way of Cheever’s son Ben, who told him about The Way Some People Live over lunch several years ago. At the time, Mr. Daley was working as an editor at the Journal News in Westchester, and Ben Cheever had been writing pieces for him about books for some time.

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 came to Dave Daley, the editor of FiveChapters.com, by way of Cheever’s son Ben, who told him about The Way Some People Live over lunch several years ago. At the time, Mr. Daley was working as an editor at the Journal News in Westchester, and Ben Cheever had been writing pieces for him about books for some time.

"He mentioned that there were probably a couple of dozen of stories that had not been collected in the big red book," Mr. Daley said yesterday, referring to this 1978 collection. "They had fallen out of print and hadn’t been seen in decades, and we talked about the possibility of running one in the newspaper."

For whatever reason, that never happened, but when Mr. Daley heard recently that there was going to be a big Cheever biography published from Knopf this spring as well as a two-volume set of his collected works from Library of America, he got in touch with Ben again, who told him he was welcome to first serial on anything he wanted. Mr. Daley got in touch with Blake Bailey, the author of the forthcoming biography and the editor of the Library of America set.

"I went through those 1,000 pages of the Library of America edition, and I wanted something that had not been seen before or had not been seen in decades," Mr. Daley said.

He finally settled on "Of Love: A Testimony," he said, because it was "a wonderful early example of all of the themes that Cheever later became such a master of describing."

Installments of the story will be posted on FiveChapters.com each weekday morning, starting Monday.

And then there are the bores—good bores and bad bores and bores in between. Reiner Stach, author of Kafka: The Decisive Years, strikes me as a good bore. He’s done his homework, all right, and can tell you everything you want to know about Kafka—his fiction, his cultural ethos, his whatever—and then he’ll tell you more. A lot more. When, for example, he explains the nuances of Kafka’s job (“Kafka dealt with the implications for insurance law of accident prevention, with ‘specification of feasibility,’ a second-degree prophylaxis” etc.), I feel like I’m being lectured by the pedantic, pony-tailed comic-book seller in The Simpsons, who in this case has a mincingly precise German accent.

Mr. Stach’s book is the first of a projected three-volume biography, and it takes 516 pages (not including notes and index) to cover the years 1910 to 1915—not, I hasten to add, the first five years of Kafka’s life. No, Mr. Stach is merciful. Rather, he begins in 1910, because that’s when Kafka’s extant diaries begin, when Kafka was 27 years old, shortly before he hit his stride as a great modernist writer. Still, it’s a little ominous: 516 pages to cover five years? If this were five years in the life of, say, Winston Churchill or Hugh Hefner, that we could understand; but as Mr. Stach winningly concedes time and again, Kafka’s life was virtually without incident. “Sometimes the most difficult life is the one that is about nothing”—this, from Kierkegaard, is an epigraph to chapter two, and I would emend it as follows: The most difficult life to read about is the one that is about nothing.

Mr. Stach’s biography is composed mostly of digressions, the first of which is a prologue about Halley’s Comet—this for the sake of mise-en-scène, I guess, as the comet passed through the world’s purview in 1910 and was regarded as a heavy portent at the time. Also, there’s a metaphorical parallel with Kafka: “At 4:10 A.M. the sun rose. At that moment Halley’s Comet was invisible to spectators in Prague, exactly in front of the glowing orb. The black star set in a cascade of light.” Kafka too was like a black star, blazing amid the glare of the Great War to come, a prophet in the guise of a simple civil servant and so on. Or maybe Mr. Stach is mocking his own approach: That is, he talks around his subject so much that Kafka himself is like a vague silhouette (or black star).

While nothing much happens in Kafka’s life, we learn a great deal about the Yiddish Theater (from which Kafka borrowed certain broad farcical gestures for his fiction), the fin-de-siècle Zionist movement (which bored Kafka), the history of the letter “as one of the essential forms of expression of modern individuality” (Kafka wrote a lot of letters), and any number of momentous historical trends. There’s a whole chapter devoted to the Balkan Wars of 1912, and a long, long primer about the causes of the Great War that followed. “It is difficult for a biographer to assess the effects of political events on the psyche and everyday life of an individual,” Mr. Stach writes, “especially when catastrophes that shape the destiny of millions of people leave almost no trace in autobiographical documents, as happened with Kafka.” Well, as almost happened with Kafka; fortunately for posterity, he did note in his vast diary a key event in the global conflagration of 1914: “Germany has declared war on Russia—Swimming in the afternoon.” Thanks to Reiner Stach, we know the larger context.

It didn’t have to be this way. Mr. Stach is a good stylist—an eloquent bore—and the parts about Kafka’s life, such as it was, would have made a fascinating 50-page treatise. For one thing, I was glad to know that Kafka was a strict vegetarian who “Fletcherized”—that is, chewed incessantly for minutes at a time—every morsel of food, such that his burgherish father Hermann would raise his newspaper in disgust. Kafka also avoided alcohol, coffee, tea, tobacco, and performed daily calisthenics (nude) in front of his open window. This makes me feel a lot better about all the booze, caffeine, cigarettes and red meat I consume, to say nothing of my general indolence, since a more sickly specimen than Kafka is hard to imagine. Almost yearly he had to retire to sanatoriums, where he was forced into rare social commerce with his fellow valetudinarians. Never at his best with family or strangers, Kafka seemed to cast a pall; his immediate neighbor at the Hartungen sanatorium, an elderly Austrian general, committed suicide a few days after he made Kafka’s acquaintance.

I was also interested to learn that Kafka was good at his job—a “first-rate draftsman,” in fact, for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, where “his unusual combination of technical, insurance-specific, and legal knowledge was indispensable.” At the Second International Congress for Rescue Services and Accident Prevention in 1913—a huge affair held in the Austrian Parliament—Kafka was instrumental in crafting a resolution whereby “certain parts of the sea be reserved exclusively for sponge fishers who are unclothed and hold a trident.” It was all ashes in his mouth, though, and after a long night of writing stark, prophetic fables of the modern human condition, Kafka often felt too desolate to get out of bed. As he wrote his employer on such a day, “For me it is a horrible double life from which there is probably no way out except insanity.”

Otherwise, the main event in Kafka’s life was his interminable courtship with Felice Bauer, a dauntingly levelheaded woman who worked for an office-machine company in Berlin. These two exchanged hundreds and hundreds of letters but rarely saw each other in person, and so one is disinclined to invoke comparisons to Abélard and Heloise. “Bony empty face,” Kafka noted in his diary the day they met, “displaying its emptiness openly.” Mr. Stach asks us to imagine Felice’s reaction on reading this in the published diaries decades later (“it must have hit her like a brick”), and that’s an intriguing thought, to be sure; but the rest of this romance, in all its comic monotony, is a dead horse that Mr. Stach flogs into a pulp. The first really pivotal moment doesn’t occur until page 160, when Felice addresses Kafka with the intimate “Du”—a development that exalts him, then depresses him, and finally (on page 274) frightens him into a condition of pre-emptive impotence. As he relates (in suitably allegorical terms) to his friend Max Brod, “Every day fantasies fill my head, for example that I lie stretched out on the ground, sliced up like a roast, and with my hand I am slowly pushing a piece of this meat toward a dog in the corner.” Did the meat ever get there? At the end of 516 pages, we still don’t know for sure.

For Reiner Stach, the essence of Kafka’s work is “his peculiar reluctance ‘to get to the point’”—thus Gregor Samsa wonders why he’s become a dung beetle, until he ends up in the dustbin none the wiser; thus Josef K. and the rest pursue quests for knowledge that never comes. In this sense, Mr. Stach’s is a consummately Kafkaesque biography. With every piece of the vast mosaic at hand—the thousands of pages of diaries, letters and fiction, the tottering heaps of ancillary research—Mr. Stach holds it all up to the light piece by piece, turning it over and over and then putting it away, at last, with a puzzled frown. Indeed, he seems to question the validity of the whole biographical enterprise: “The best we can say is, It may have, could have, must have been this way.” Well, yes, but only a bore—albeit a good bore (a “hermeneutically dutiful” bore, as Mr. Stach puts it)—would bother to say so.

Blake Bailey is the author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. He’s now writing a biography of John Cheever.

Never mind that short stories have been more or less profitably published since Nathaniel Hawthorne's day. Never mind that the O. Henry Awards, named for a master of the form, have ferreted out distinguished works and future stars for 100 years; that many of our greatest modern writers crafted their best work in short story form (think John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor); that The New Yorker has for most of its life epitomized the discovery and dissemination of short fiction, as have a range of magazines including Atlantic Monthly , Ploughshares , Esquire , The Paris Review and Harper's .

Never mind all that. Suddenly, the short story is news. The imminent publication, by Knopf and Viking, of collections by unknown writers Nathan Englander and Melissa Bank–both acquired for healthy six-figure sums–has literary agents smelling big money for their seemingly smaller clients, and editors reconsidering a form that had lately been consigned to the backwater of university presses. Francis Ford Coppola's new magazine, Zoetrope , dedicated exclusively to the short story–from which Ms. Bank, among others, was launched–has affirmed the new glamour of short fiction. Nowadays, stories are as hot as an editor's fingers scribbling in the company checkbook.

The most highly regarded of the annual short story anthologies–because of the range of selection, the adroit balancing of established writers and fresh talent, the stature of its permanent and guest editors–is The Best American Short Stories , which has been published annually since 1915. With the idea of getting a jump on millennium fever, the 1999 volume has been dubbed, in a masterful stroke of marketing genius, The Best American Short Stories of the Century .

Are these really the best of the century? Well, no. They are, in fact, editor John Updike's selection of the best of 85 years' worth of Best American Short Stories volumes. Does it matter that some of the stories are with hindsight not their authors' best efforts? Not really. The 55 stories here, from Benjamin Rosenblatt's "Zelig" (1915) to E. Annie Proulx's "The Half-Skinned Steer" (1998), are seductive and highly satisfying; the overall effect of reading such a collection is one of fantastic discovery, as well as pride in the American genius for the form. I felt a little like I was watching a (long) history of the movies, starting with scenes from flickering black-and-white silents and only gradually coming upon the Technicolor studio greats.

Mr. Updike (who notes in his introduction that he feels the importance of short fiction as a means by which we communicate and share our daily lives has diminished–and he's right, of course) instituted strict guidelines for his choices. Certain canonical authors–such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty–had to be included. Stories had to reflect the century's passage of time, and had to treat either North American characters or events on this continent. And yet, he notes, "I tried not to select stories because they illustrated a theme or portion of the national experience but because they struck me as lively, beautiful, believable, and, in the human news they brought, important."

The result is a most interesting mix of good and great, of obscure writers and much-anthologized classics, of literary curios and polished diamonds. In publishing circles a "gotcha!" game has of course sprung up, identifying famous authors excluded from this collection. And in a volume with such a definitive title, the absence of any work by J.D. Salinger, Irwin Shaw, Peter Taylor, Paul Bowles, Ray Bradbury, Nelson Algren, James Thurber, William Maxwell or John Steinbeck, to mention some stellar no-shows, is regrettable. John O'Hara and Mary McCarthy never made it into the Best American Short Stories , and so do not appear now. The all-star no-shows listed above were each selected for inclusion more than once in their day, and were contenders for this new collection. Alas, they didn't make the final, no doubt painful, cut. But what Mr. Updike has chosen offers such riches that I can only regret, for the pleasure of reading prose this good, that this is not a two-volume set.

What a range of American lives is displayed here! Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" (1917) tells of conspiratorial compassion when a husband's abusive behavior results in his murder. Dorothy Parker's frothy "Here We Are" (1931) plays with wedding-night jitters. Philip Roth's "Defender of the Faith" (1960) examines religious identity during World War II. Alice Adams' "Roses, Rhododendron" (1976) considers the very subtle sides to friendship. We read here of the horrors of death by cancer and AIDS and the sickening feeling of finally facing one's own emotional weaknesses and character flaws, of the powerful gift of love a child's death provides her parents, of social disjointedness, of small-town snobbery and generosity, of the terrible demands of one's peers, of how very quickly one's frailties will overcome strength.

Our finest writers lead the parade: Robert Penn Warren on a poor country family, Bernard Malamud on the effects of war and dislocation, Raymond Carver, J.F. Powers ("Death of a Favorite" is narrated by a cat), Joyce Carol Oates, Willa Cather, Vladimir Nabokov. But there are other pleasures in store, including the oft-touted and here genuine excitement of discovery. One of the book's best stories is Lawrence Sargent Hall's 1960 tale, "The Ledge." A riveting account of the terrifying last night in the lives of a fisherman and his two boys, it packs a menacing emotional pull with beautifully controlled, moving prose. Hall is not much read today, if at all. This story should invite reconsideration. And the biographical data (or lack thereof) provided about other similarly forgotten writers is fascinating. Alexander Godin ("My Dead Brother Comes to America," 1934) worked as a bottler in a chemical plant; Mary Lerner ("Little Selves," 1916) was published here and there. About both, the notes simply say, "Nothing more is known about him/her." Mary Ladd Gavell's "The Rotifer" (1968) was her only published story; it appeared posthumously as her memorial in Psychiatry , where she was the managing editor.

Another thrill comes from rereading masterpieces of the genre. To fall into John Cheever's "The Country Husband" for the umpteenth time is to realize again how very great a writer he was, how rare and how extraordinary was the grace of his sentences, the clarity of his understanding of his characters. I can say without hesitation that Cheever's collected stories, which won a Pulitzer Prize and an American Book Award in 1979, qualifies as an alternate, one-man version of The Best American Short Stories of the Century .

Elizabeth Bishop's "The Farmer's Children" (1949) shines with a cold savage beauty. Her account of the death of two small children in a barn on a twinkly frozen night is a stunning example of prose at its best, and is alone worth the price of this book. And then there's John Updike's own entry, "Gesturing" (1980), a tale of the rise and fall of the Maples, his favorite maritally challenged protagonists. "Gesturing" is a reminder, if any is needed, of how fortunate we readers are that he is a writer who, with no visible effort and seemingly endlessly, decade after decade, can transmit a momentary thought into the most graceful, eloquent sentences imaginable.

In sum, this is a terrific collection that ought to be read by anyone interested in good writing or curious about the 20th-century American social scene. The inevitable moments of tedium–not all of the stories are brilliant, not all of the writers memorable, and certainly the book should be taken in small sips, not in large gulps–are far outweighed by the accumulated treasures Mr. Updike has assembled. And its greatest gift is to send us scurrying to the shelves for larger collections by individual writers found here.

It's not surprising the novelist Susan Cheever got entangled in the drinking habit very young. Her father was John Cheever, arguably the most accomplished short story writer America has produced, and certainly high on the list of its most accomplished drunkards.

By way of introducing us to a world in which the walls are streaked with shoe polish from guests falling down the stairs, a world in which visitors are frequently given a room to sleep off lunch until the following morning, Susan Cheever begins her memoir of drinking with a WASP cliché: the family martini recipe, which she learned from her grandmother at age 6. With braggadocio masquerading as contrition, she informs us that the key is to "just pass the [vermouth] bottle over the gin." Ms. Cheever is not unaware that this also happens to be the recipe for transforming the ruling class of the most powerful nation on earth into its lowest-earning white ethnic group. But Note Found in a Bottle is less about the milieu of Yankee alcoholism than how a woman from such a milieu makes her way in the world of love and career.

At the heart of this book are Ms. Cheever's three marriages–to Malcolm Cowley's son Robert, New Yorker art critic Calvin Tomkins and radical-chic editor Warren Hinckle. (The first two are given only first names, but a biography of John Cheever will help you fill in the blanks.) Ms. Cheever implies her first marriage was driven largely by a desire to please her father. In Palma de Mallorca, she and Robert set themselves up as "writers" and did little but drink. (When Robert, suffering intestinal pains, was advised to lay off drink for a few weeks, Susan buttonholed the doctor: "You don't mean wine too?") They fought, and occasionally came to blows. But booze was implicated more in unfulfilled potential than in any of the out-and-out wreckage we'd associate with "alcoholism." Back in the United States, their bookless, jobless lives looked much less glamorous. "With breathtaking speed, it seemed, we had gone from being a promising, talented young couple to a couple of has-beens," Ms. Cheever writes.

But not for long. Ms. Cheever caught on with Newsweek and was soon making a play for the much older Mr. Tomkins. While a lover of champagne, Mr. Tomkins was a doting family man and very much under control. Their marriage was a fruitful time for Ms. Cheever, who wrote her first novel ("The prose seemed to burn right on the page"), had her first child, and moved into Julia Child's house on the Côte d'Azur. Ms. Cheever also seemed to like the social set they traveled in, for here begins a marathon of literary- and art-world name-dropping that runs through Janet Maslin (Ms. Cheever's sister-in-law), John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, Roger Angell, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Massie (with whom she has a fling) and Francis Ford Coppola (who tells her–she forgets why–"you're a good person").

Though Ms. Cheever doesn't say so, something other than booze is at the root of this marriage's collapse. The problem was that, once she had Mr. Tomkins in the bag, he ceased to interest her. All three of Ms. Cheever's husbands were married when she began dating them, and there is an exuberant sluttishness about her recounting of the times when she occasionally had three men in a day. "I didn't know," she lets drop darkly, "that promiscuity can be a symptom of clinical depression."

Ms. Cheever wanted adventure. She drifted back into an on-again, off-again relationship with Warren Hinckle, who, long past his glory days as editor of the leftist Ramparts , was living an alcohol-clouded existence in San Francisco. They married and had a son. Mr. Hinckle was wild, romantic and irresponsible. "He agreed," Ms. Cheever writes, "that we had a great love, that we weren't like other people, that our love transcended the silly lives led by most people we knew." It was perhaps because of the anarchy in his life that Ms. Cheever fell for him. She suspects that at some level it put her in mind of her father, since "every man I've been involved with has somehow been a shadow of his giant figure."

All the same, Mr. Hinckle's drinking began to alarm her, and she tried to arrange–without success–to check him into a detox center. In retrospect, she sees this as a projection of her own drinking problem.

"What alcohol does is hidden until the very end," says Ms. Cheever. If so, how convenient for her. Because when we reach the catastrophic moment all drunkards must face, when the carefree illusions of youthful tippling expire in vomit, deceit and dishonor … she changes the subject. We surface in the present: Ms. Cheever informs us that she has found contentment in her two children and God, and hasn't had a drink in five years.

It's not surprising that she doesn't want to share with us the gory details. But as long as she doesn't, she's asking us to commiserate over a life she's basically bragging about. She goes easy on herself, and yet she used to be tougher, as she was with her father, whom she posthumously outed in a 1984 memoir.

Ms. Cheever lets on that sometime in the past decade, she decided to leave behind "all those terrible things, those long, sexy afternoons and those betrayals." Unsurprisingly, she fails to offer much evidence of what's so terrible about "long, sexy afternoons." No–alcohol, as it appears in these pages, did some nifty things for Ms. Cheever, on top of the nifty things it does for normal drinkers. It helped her to play a distinctive role among unconventional and glamorous people. It still offers her a road into identity politics and victim-discourse that even a WASP can travel. Anyway, what would she set in the place of it? While Ms. Cheever claims to be riven with regret, she doesn't name a single decision she'd take back, or a single one of her famous friends she'd ditch. Or even a single husband: "It's true," she says, "that I have had three marriages that ended, but these days I don't remember them as failures." Booze may indeed have wrecked her life, but there's little evidence of it in this book.

Ms. Cheever cannot decide whether she wants to be judged as an adult or as a moral automaton. In fact, she wants it both ways. Credit as an adult for the saint I am; expiation as a moral automaton for the lousy things I do. In one bizarre episode from the waning days of her marriage to Mr. Tomkins, she ditches her 5-year-old daughter, who has come down with the chickenpox, to take off for Cuba with Warren Hinckle. Ms. Cheever explains it away through what sounds like a combination of recovery movement and recovered memory: "In my heart I was re-enacting a separation of mother and daughter that resonated from before I could remember." Ms. Cheever is using alcoholism to separate herself from her human failings: The love for my daughter is me; the blowing town to dance on the beach in Havana is my disease.

The fault for this moral muddle may lie in the way people quit drinking, especially in this country. Ms. Cheever is a convert to Alcoholics Anonymous, which holds that recovery from alcoholism is contingent on recognizing that one is "powerless over alcohol," and that one's body and mind are wired to send urges to drink in the most crafty and cunning ways. Obviously, the idea of powerlessness as promulgated by A.A. is not limited to booze. How can it be? If you are just a machine of addictive trickery, then every turn of your mind, every bit of your reason, is just a ruse to get you back on the bottle. Your love of Chinese food is just your alcohol addiction providing a pretext to get you to the Wang Hung Palace where the bartender knows you. Your hatred of the government is just projected "anger" that you can't drink as much as you want. Worst of all, any trust in your willpower, your intelligence, your maturity to get you out of this problem is "denial."

What's missing is the morality that's necessary if one is to draw any meaning out of drinking. This needn't be a sackcloth-and-ashes moralism; even the morality of André Gide in Corydon , in which he answered accusations of pederasty by recasting his vice as a virtue, would be welcome. (Heavy drinking is long overdue such a defense.) Without some such moral benchmark, Ms. Cheever's transformation looks like the opportunism of another American baby boomer who's gone from left-wing libertine to right-wing prude at–how convenient!–the very moment her own appetites begin to wane.

But where should the ambitious young writer of today spend his or her summer? It's true that Yaddo, founded by New York City robber baron Spencer Trask and his poet wife Katrina Trask at the turn of the century, carries the most prestige. And more so than other colonies, Yaddo truly pampers its guests. "You're treated well, you get all the time you need," said one poet of the colony experience. "You start feeling good, so you're extra funny or extra flirtatious. You're totally in your right mind, your best self is there, doing your art, which is supposed to be who you are."

Summer isn't high season for the colonies just because of the weather. Most literary fiction writers these days are on the university calendar, teaching freshman comp or advanced workshops at Master of Fine Arts programs. And a summer's stay at Yaddo or MacDowell polishes the résumé.

A mere 10 years ago, colony applicants were known to solicit recommendations from friends, colleagues, even next-door neighbors. Today, they turn to professors, agents and editors. "Part of the weird fallout of M.F.A. programs is that starting writers have professional connections out of proportion with their talents," said novelist Sarah Schulman. "These people shouldn't even know who these agents are."

Indeed, even at the relatively low-key Blue Mountain Center, which caters to creative types with a social conscience, publishing is the dominant conversation topic among writers–"Bitching about editors and commiserating about what a viper pit the world of trade publishing is," as one writer put it.

Acceptance to a colony brings validation–"the opposite of milking validation from The New York Review of Books ," said one novelist. And once you're in, you're in–to the consternation of some. "It seems like a push to protect up-and-coming white male writers," said Ms. Schulman. "Do we really need a new John Cheever?"

Maybe, maybe not. But in any case, the colonies are seen, especially by young writers, as places where they can disturb the gold dust of their literary forebears. "Every room here is storied," said a Yaddo novelist. "Whether I was writing or jerking off in the room where Philip Roth wrote The Breast , I was following in the steps of genius."

Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Sex and death permeate Yaddo, located on a 400-acre estate, but both take a back seat to ambition. Writers come to Yaddo, said one poet, "to meet and sleep with the well-known in their field." A cricketlike hum of performance anxiety buzzes beneath the surface, whether one is gathering in the "Drinks Room," attending a dance party in the woods, or hanging around the pool (an amenity installed at John Cheever's urging). But first you've got to abide by "quiet time," which is 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. That's when you're supposed to be working.

"Everything's a little mildewy," said a Yaddo poet. Indeed, the colony is crawling with spirits. The poet Stanley Kunitz once fled, hours after arriving, after he saw ghosts of two Trask children, and Katrina Trask's apparition is said to haunt one of the outbuildings, West House.

The A-list prefer to stay in the Trasks' 55-room Victorian mansion, as opposed to one of the outbuildings like Pine Guard, East House or Pine Tree. Rooms in the mansion have names (Linoleum Room, Mountain View). But some find Yaddo claustrophobic. "The policy is corrupt," said one novelist. "The board members use it as a vacation home. Other places are better and happier." But where else would you see novelist Rick Moody ( The Ice Storm ) mysteriously wearing a black veil on a fine spring day?

Who's been: John Cheever, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Philip Roth, Nora Sayre, David Sedaris, Mona Simpson, James Salter.

Yearly applicants: 1,000.

Yearly spaces: About 200; during the summer a maximum of 36 writers, artists and musicians at any one time.

History: Spencer and Katrina buy property in 1881, original residence is razed by fire, current mansion is built in 1893, small daughter suggests name "Yaddo." All four children lost to awful fates at early age. A corporation is formed in 1900, stating intention for artists' colony. Spencer Trask dies in 1909, Katrina in 1922–at which point George Foster Peabody assumes the watch and hires finger-shaking Elizabeth Ames to run the place. First group of creative writers arrive in 1926.

Where's the money from?: Public and private funding; donations from artists; chairman Don Rice and president Michael Sundell recently got $3 million out of the estate of mystery novelist Patricia Highsmith.

Architecture: Funereal; dark wood, heavy furniture carved with faces.

Some books that were written there (or which were supposedly written there): Most of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint ; part of Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City ; most of Rick Moody's Purple America .

Best accommodations: Katrina Trask's massive bedroom (North Studio) in the mansion, with three walls of windows looking out at the Green Mountains; or Spencer Trasks' former study (Den), with walnut wainscoting, pocket doors, quick-getaway side door leading to carriage entrance.

Worst accommodations: Any room in East House, decked out in ripped, dingy wall-to-wall carpeting.

Feature that makes you feel like you are "roughing it": Sharing a bathroom.

Chow: Elaborate buffet-style dinners, different world cuisine every night but "hard on vegetarians"; fresh flowers on every table; real strawberry shortcake; lunch (sandwich, julienned carrots in waxed-paper bag) in a construction worker's lunch box.

Cocktail hour: After "quiet time" (4 P.M.) on the flagstone terrace behind the mansion ("Even people you wouldn't talk to at home, you'd squander half an hour with here," confided one successful novelist); B.Y.O.B.; Yaddo discount at local wine shop!

Entertainment: Movie theater at the mall (just one mile away!); memoirist Tobias Schneebaum leading group-sing of indigenous South American rowing songs; solo night swimming in the pool (illegal!).

Physical exercise available (and that is likely to result in out-of-shape short-story writer breaking ankle): Ping-pong, tennis, YMCA, running away from readings ("We decided they were vulgar ," said one prose writer).

Best trysting: Cylindrical composer's studio that used to be the ice house; excellent acoustics.

Well, what about the help?: Contact between staff and writers strongly discouraged; guests describe the "Ichabod Crane-like personnel" as "explicitly deferential."

Is there a TV?: In the former stables, "but no one watches it."

Type of writer favored: Fiction.

Level of competitive anxiety (1 to 5, 5 being highest ): 5, especially at dinnertime when people are choosing at which table to eat.

Board members include: A.M. Homes, Oscar Hijuelos, Allan Gurganus, poet Michael Harper, playwright Romulus Linney.

Sex vibe: Humana-humana-humana ; "Doesn't differ much from corporate conventions."

Days of rain last summer: 28.

Best outing: Drinks at the Adelphi Hotel, a day at Saratoga Racetrack.

Caveat: There is said to be horse pee and fertilizer runoff in Yaddo's many alluring ponds.

MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, N.H.

Yaddo's blissed-out alter ego. Sweetness and light set in 450 acres of New Hampshire woods. "I met people who did art forms I never heard of," said one writer, "and that was more important than who met who, and whose agent is what." Still, some writers like to double-dip, splitting their summer between Yaddo and MacDowell. At MacDowell, casual dress, casual scheduling (no designated "quiet time"), casual food. Casual mention on application brochure of Pulitzer Prize winners (Studs Terkel, Galway Kinnell, Doris Kearns Goodwin) who were residents. Each writer gets living quarters plus his or her own private studio (32 in all) set away from others. "You have to look to find someone," said one novelist. Haute rustic living, like "an elegant camp." Rules say that no one is allowed to visit a studio without invitation, but people regularly drop by to extend invitations for a swim or a trip to town. Some studios are clapboard; one is a stone church brought from Switzerland and rebuilt.

No ghosts–just sentimental charm. Each cabin has a soft-wood "tombstone," which residents are supposed to sign when they leave.

Who's been: Edwin Arlington Robinson, Alice Walker, Aaron Copland, Jules Feiffer, Donald Antrim.

Yearly applicants: About 1,200.

Yearly spaces: About 212; during the summer a maximum of 32 writers, artists and musicians at any one time.

History : Composer Edward MacDowell (a founder of the American Academy in Rome) and wife Marian MacDowell buy a farm in 1896 to hang out in summers. In 1906, J.P. Morgan and pals create a fund to help support Edward MacDowell after he is struck by a nervous disorder. After MacDowell dies in 1908, Marian sets up colony using fund, and she also travels U.S. giving concerts to help raise money to build some studios.

Where's the money from?: Private contributors, National Endowment for the Arts, other public funding.

Architecture: Thoreau goes to camp.

Some books that got written there: Thornton Wilder's Our Town ; part of Donald Antrim's The Hundred Brothers .

Accommodations: "Like a little summer room at Block Island."

Feature that makes you feel like you are "roughing it": Black flies, occasioning fashion trend of draping mosquito netting from your hat.

Chow: Bland, served family-style, food set out on tables.

Cocktail hour: B.Y.O.B., twilight, back porch of Colony Hall or in walled garden filled with lilac trees.

Physical exercise available: Pool; climbing Mount Monadnock.

Best trysting: Any of the 32 studios, each very private and equipped with sleeping cot (drag mattress to floor), fireplace and tea kettle; "MacDowell is perfect for affairs," said one writer.

Type of writer favored: Fiction.

Level of competitive anxiety: 4.

Board members include: Former Brown University president Vartan Gregorian, playwright Wendy Wasserstein, actress Jane Alexander.

Sex vibe: Jeff Eugenides ( The Virgin Suicides ) and sculptor Karen Yamauchi eventually got married.

Days of rain last summer: 29.

Best outing: Skinny-dipping at Willard Pond.

Caveat :"Like staying at your grandmother's."

Blue Mountain Center, Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y.

Anyone seen my Birkenstocks? Politically active writers–the kind who wrote for the "old" New Yorker –and artists find a home at Blue Mountain, which is tucked into 3,000 private Adirondack acres studded with pines, hemlocks and balsams. Nine of the 14 people at each four-week session are writers. (In the fall, Blue Mountain hosts conferences for organizations like Greenpeace and the Nature Conservancy.) The small group means everyone gets drawn into whatever drama–personal or political–is unfolding. Guests have come from Cuba, India and Israel–but New York lefties rule, with 30 percent of the applications coming from Greenwich Village, Brooklyn and the Upper West Side.

Who's been: James Lardner, Sue Halpern, Bill McKibben, Sally Belfrage.

Yearly applicants: 300.

Yearly spaces: 60.

History: Harold Hochschild and his brother owned mining company American Metals Company, and Harold always wanted an artists colony. Yaddo, nearby, was a kind of model. His only child, Adam Hochschild (who founded the magazine Mother Jones ), inherited Harold's lodge and share of the property, and opened it as a colony in 1982.

Where's the money from?: Harold's endowment.

Architecture: Lodge living.

Some books that got written there: William Finnegan's Dateline Soweto , James Lardner's Crusader , Bernard Lefkowitz's Our Guys .

Best accommodations: Any room with a private bathroom.

Feature that makes you feel like you are "roughing it": Black flies.

Chow: Vegetarian cook famous for homemade bread and cookies; curried chicken, stir-fried veggies, poppy seed cake.

Average weight gained: Five pounds.

Cocktail hour: On the Adirondack chairs on the lodge's stone veranda, looking out over Eagle Lake.

Physical exercise: Canoeing, tennis, hiking, gardening.

Best trysting: With only 14 guests, better bring your back issues of Yellow Silk .

Level of competitive anxiety: 3.

Who's on the board?: Nobody; Quaker antiwar activist Harriet Barlow calls the shots.

Days of rain last summer: 27.

Best outing: Hiking on Blue Mountain.

Caveat: "C'mon guys, chip into the wine fund!"

Ucross Foundation, Ucross, Wyo.

Twenty-two thousand acres of "nothing upon nothing" in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountain Range, and if Annie Proulx hadn't written part of her literary best seller The Shipping News there, no one would have ever heard of it. "Who goes out to rural Wyoming to be social? Everyone's there to really work–some even work after dinner," recalled one former resident. Unlike the other summer colonies, Ucross closes for June and July. The rest of the year, a new group arrives every week, and most of them don't rate on the fame meter. One writer found the dominant conversation at dinner to be about … art.

Deer and antelope graze outside your window. And, yes, ladies, instead of holding hands with neurasthenic, trust-funded first novelists at Yaddo, you'll meet real live cowboys and ranchers!

Who's been: Annie Proulx, who also sits on the board and lives in Wyoming.

Yearly applicants: About 400.

Yearly spaces: About 65; eight people at any one time.

History: The main buildings of Ucross' Big Red complex (built in 1882) originally served as headquarters for the Pratt and Ferris Cattle Company. The Ucross Foundation Residency Program opened in 1983, but there's still a cattle-ranching operation. At one time, 57,000 head of cattle roamed the property.

Where's the money from?: Wyoming Arts Council, N.E.A., private donors.

Architecture: Renovated hayloft.

Book that got written there: Part of Annie Proulx's The Shipping News , Jim Grimsley's My Drowning , Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant .

Accommodations: You'll sleep in either a former schoolhouse or a former railroad depot, and you'll be sharing a bathroom.

Feature that makes you feel like you are "roughing it": Nearest bagel 30 miles away in Sheridan, Wyo.

Chow: "Ridiculously good"; lots of steak; can accommodate special dietary requests.

Cocktail hour: Drinks and smokes on the porch; otherwise, Red Arrow bar is 10 miles away.

Entertainment: Videos in the barn (well stocked with Federico Fellini, Eric Rohmer, Krzystof Kieslowski), star shows in the night sky, croaking frogs.

Physical exercise: Stream strolling, branding cattle (including castration, which come to think of it, might fit in well at Yaddo).

Type of writer favored: Fiction.

Level of competitive anxiety: 1.

Who's the boss?: Executive director Sharon Dynak, who used to be a publicist at Scribner.

Sex vibe: You do the math: seven other guests and you, and the town of Ucross has a population of 25.

Caveat : June snowstorms.