October 8th, 2013 / 2:03 pm
Massive People

John Cheever fiction published in The New Yorker

“Brooklyn Rooming House” – May 25, 1935 (pp. 93-96)
“Buffalo” – June 22, 1935 (pp. 66-68)
“Play A March” – June 20, 1936 (pp. 20-21)
“A Picture for the Home” – Nov. 28, 1936 (pp. 80-83)
“In the Beginning” – Nov. 6, 1937 (pp. 77-80)
“Treat” – Jan. 21, 1939 (pp. 50-51)
“The Happiest Days” – Nov. 4, 1939 (pp. 15-16)
“It’s Hot in Egypt” – Jan. 6, 1940 (pp. 20-21)
“North of Portland” – Feb. 24, 1940 (pp. 20-21)
“Survivor” – Mar. 9, 1940 (pp. 54-56)
“Washington Boarding House” – Mar. 23, 1940 (pp. 23-24)
“Riding Stable” – Apr. 27, 1940 (pp. 20-21)
“Happy Birthday, Enid” – July 13, 1940 (pp. 15-16)
“Tomorrow Is a Beautiful Day” – Aug. 3, 1940 (pp. 15-16)
“Summer Theatre” – Aug. 24, 1940 (pp. 45-48)
“The New World” – Nov. 9, 1940 (pp. 17-19)
“Forever Hold Your Peace” – Nov. 23, 1940 (pp. 16-18)
“When Grandmother Goes” – Dec. 14, 1940 (pp. 68-75)
“Hello, Dear” – Feb. 15, 1941 (pp. 20-21)
“The Law of the Jungle” – Mar. 22, 1941 (pp. 16-18)
“There They Go” – July 19, 1941 (pp. 17-18)
“Run, Sheep, Run” – Aug. 2, 1941 (pp. 50-52)
“Publick House” – Aug. 16, 1941 (pp. 45-49)
“These Tragic Years” – Sept. 27, 1941 (pp. 15-17)
“In the Eyes of God” – Oct. 11, 1941 (pp. 20-22)
“The Pleasures of Solitude” – Jan. 24, 1942 (pp. 19-21)
“A Place of Great Historical Interest” – Feb. 21, 1942 (pp. 17-19)
“The Shape of a Night” – Apr. 18, 1942 (pp. 14-16)
“Goodbye, Broadway—Hello, Hello” – June 6, 1942 (pp. 19-20)
“Problem No. 4” – Oct. 17, 1942 (pp. 23-24)
“The Man Who Was Very Homesick for New York” – Nov. 21, 1942 (pp. 19-22)
“Sergeant Limeburner” – Mar. 13, 1943 (pp. 19-25)
“They Shall Inherit the Earth” – Apr. 10, 1943 (pp. 17-18)
“A Tale of Old Pennsylvania” – May 29, 1943 (pp. 20-23)
“The Invisible Ship” – Aug. 7, 1943 (pp. 17-21)
“My Friends and Neighbors All, Farewell” – Oct. 2, 1943 (pp. 23-26)
“Dear Lord, We Thank Thee for Thy Bounty” – Nov. 27, 1943 (pp. 30-31)
“Somebody Has to Die” – June 24, 1944 (pp. 27-28)
“The Single Purpose of Leon Burrows” – Oct. 7, 1944 (pp. 18-22)
“The Mouth of the Turtle” – Nov. 11, 1944 (pp. 27-28)
“Town House” – Apr. 21, 1945 (pp. 23-26)
“Manila” – July 28, 1945 (pp. 20-23)
“Town House—II” – Aug. 11, 1945 (pp. 20-25)
“Town House—III” – Nov. 10, 1945 (pp. 27-32)
“Town House—IV” – Jan. 5, 1946 (pp. 23-28)
“Town House—V” – Mar. 16, 1946 (pp. 26-30)
“Town House—VI” – May 4, 1946 (pp. 22-27)
“The Sutton Place Story” – June 29, 1946 (pp. 19-26)
“Love in the Islands” – Dec. 7, 1946 (pp. 42-44)
“The Beautiful Mountains” – Feb. 8, 1947 (pp. 26-30)
“The Enormous Radio” – May 17, 1947 (pp. 28-33)
“The Common Day” – Aug. 2, 1947 (pp. 19-24)
“Roseheath” – Aug. 16, 1947 (pp. 29-31)
“Torch Song” – Oct. 4, 1947 (pp. 31-39)
“O City of Broken Dreams” – Jan. 24, 1948 (pp. 22-31)
“Keep the Ball Rolling” – May 29, 1948 (pp. 21-26)
“The Summer Farmer” – Aug. 7, 1948 (pp. 18-22)
“The Hartleys” – Jan. 22, 1949 (pp. 26-29)
“The Temptations of Emma Boynton” – Nov. 26, 1949 (pp. 29-31)
“Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor” – Dec. 24, 1949 (pp. 19-22)
“The Season of Divorce” – Mar. 4, 1950 (pp. 22-27)
“The Pot of Gold” – Oct. 14, 1950 (pp. 30-38)
“The People You Meet” – Dec. 2, 1950 (pp. 44-49)
“Clancy in the Tower of Babel” – Mar. 24, 1951 (pp. 24-28)
“Goodbye, My Brother” – Aug. 25, 1951 (pp. 22-31)
“The Superintendent” – Mar. 29, 1952 (pp. 28-34)
“The Chaste Clarissa” – June 14, 1952 (pp. 29-33)
“The Cure” – July 5, 1952 (pp. 18-22)
“The Children” – Sept. 6, 1952 (pp. 34-45)
“O Youth and Beauty!” – Aug. 22, 1953 (pp. 20-25)
“The National Pastime” – Sept. 26, 1953 (pp. 29-35)
“The Sorrows of Gin” – Dec. 12, 1953 (pp. 42-48)
“The Five-Forty-Eight” – April 10, 1954 (pp. 28-34)
“Independence Day at St. Botolph’s” – July 3, 1954 (pp. 18-23)
“The Day the Pig Fell into the Well” – Oct. 23, 1954 (pp. 32-40)
“The Country Husband” – Nov. 20, 1954 (pp. 38-48)
“Just Tell Me Who It Was” – Apr. 16, 1955 (pp. 38-46)
“Just One More Time” – Oct. 8, 1955 (pp. 40-42)
“The Bus to St. James’s” – Jan. 14, 1956 (pp. 24-31)
“The Journal of an Old Gent” – Feb. 18, 1956 (pp. 32-59)
“The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” – Apr. 14, 1956 (pp. 42-71)
“Miss Wapshot” – Sept. 22, 1956 (pp. 40-43)
“Clear Haven” – Dec. 1, 1956 (pp. 50-111)
“The Trouble of Marcy Flint” – Nov. 9, 1957 (pp. 40-46)
“The Bella Lingua” – Mar. 1, 1958 (pp. 34-55)
“Paola” – July 26, 1958 (pp. 22-29)
“The Wrysons” – Sept. 13, 1958 (pp. 38-41)
“The Duchess” – Dec. 13, 1958 (pp. 42-48)
“The Scarlet Moving Van” – Mar. 21, 1959 (pp. 44-50)
“The Events of That Easter” – May 16, 1959 (pp. 40-48)
“The Golden Age” – Sept. 26, 1959 (pp. 46-50)
“The Lowboy” – Oct. 10, 1959 (pp. 38-42)
“The Music Teacher” – Nov. 21, 1959 (pp. 50-56)
“A Woman Without a Country” – Dec. 12, 1959 (pp. 48-50)
“Clementina” – May 7, 1960 (pp. 40-48)
“Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Novel” – Nov. 12, 1960 (pp. 54-58)
“The Chimera” – July 1, 1961 (pp. 30-36)
“Seaside Houses” – July 29, 1961 (pp. 19-23)
“The Angel of the Bridge” – Oct. 21, 1961 (pp. 49-52)
“The Brigadier and the Golf Widow” – Nov. 11, 1961 (pp. 53-60)
“The Traveller” – Dec. 9, 1961 (pp. 50-58)
“Christmas Eve in St. Botolph’s” – Dec. 23, 1961 (pp. 26-31)
“A Vision of the World” – Sept. 29, 1962 (pp. 42-46)
“Reunion” – Oct. 27, 1962 (p. 45)
“The Embarkment for Cythera” – Nov. 3, 1962 (pp. 59-106)
 “Metamorphoses” – Mar. 2, 1963 (pp. 32-39)
“The International Wilderness” – Apr. 6, 1963 (pp. 43-47)
“Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” – Apr. 27, 1963 (pp. 38-41)
“An Educated American Woman” – Nov. 2, 1963 (pp. 46-54)
“The Habit” – Mar. 7, 1964 (pp. 45-47)
“Montraldo” – June 6, 1964 (pp. 37-39)
“Marito in Città” – July 4, 1964 (pp. 26-31)
“The Swimmer” – July 18, 1964 (pp. 28-34)
“The Ocean” – Aug. 1, 1964 (pp. 30-40)
“Another Story” – Feb. 25, 1967 (pp. 42-48)
“Bullet Park” – Nov. 25, 1967 (pp. 56-59)
“Percy” – Sept. 21, 1968 (pp. 45-50)
“The Folding-Chair Set” – Oct. 13, 1975 (pp. 36-38)
“The Night Mummy Got the Wrong Mink Coat” – Apr. 21, 1980 (p. 35)
“The Island” – Apr. 27, 1981 (p. 41)

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26 Comments

  1. Kyle Minor

      He was working his ass off for ten years before he started to hit his stride, and then the really interesting stuff, where he starts experimenting wildly with form, doesn’t hit for another fifteen years in. In between, he does things with stories, structurally, and in terms of beginnings and endings, and in terms of the use of the first-person narrator, that nobody’s ever done before. Reading this list, after a few years of reading Cheever, I see a writer seeking — and finding — paths to freedom and singularity, learning to chase his own weird wants and succeeding utterly, especially in his failures.

      Many readers are turned off by his WASP-y, suburban narrators, or by the slick surfaces and the fantasies they sometimes indulge, but Cheever was always playing double-agent on all that stuff, and what’s underneath it is often as dark as things get.

      I don’t know the purpose of the post. Probably it’s meant ironically, or the joke’s on whomever responds in whatever way. Or maybe not. But who cares? There’s a lot to knock a reader out in Cheever, even though for some readers (I was one), it takes a little while to fall into it. (That was my fault, not Cheever’s.)

      After you do, there’s a catalog of the world in here, overlaid on a catalog of carefully concealed experiment with form and speaker, sometimes submerged beneath a weird surrealism that nobody’s ever been able to completely explain.

  2. reynard seifert

      i like the one where the guy finds himself in an absurd situation

  3. Brooks Sterritt

      You’ve read more Cheever than I have, and you’ve read him way more generously. I enjoyed reading your analysis/paean.

      About the “purpose” of the post–it’s funny how you imply you don’t know and you don’t care, while simultaneously trying to insert some sort of ironic motive and actually, well, caring. I really hope you’re not trying to go the route of “irony and its woes in the contemporary age.” Things can be ironic and unironic at the same time. A list can suggest to some people that Cheever and the New Yorker are stale, dry, and leathery, and to others it can suggest a towering achievement. I like this list, and the fact that it is presented sans context/explanation.

  4. Richard Grayson

      I loved Cheever when I discovered him as teenager in the 60s. I was thinking the other day, after reading a NYTBR piece that referenced it, I’d like to reread “Bullet Park,” my favorite Cheever novel. I met him once, at a 1978 National Arts Club dinner honoring Saul Bellow with their gold medal in literature, when he and Bernard Malamud were chosen to stand up and praise Bellow. He seemed kind of weary of life to me, but then I was just a kid and prone to misunderstand the looks of older people. I still like teaching “The Swimmer,” “The Enormous Radio,” and a couple of the other stories David has listed.

  5. Kyle Minor

      I do care about Cheever, enough to have responded. I don’t know what kind of generalities anyone could offer about the contemporary age. The contemporary age seems to be full of all kinds of competing and contradictory things, like you said.

  6. Brooks Sterritt

      It felt like you were defending Cheever (preemptively or something) and attacking irony, which is so fun to attack these days.

  7. bartleby_taco

      should i read john cheever

      i feel like ‘john cheever’ is a name that was filed in my brain as ‘author you don’t care about’ several years ago without explanation

      i don’t know anything about john cheever

      i remember his name being used in a seinfeld joke once, i think, about george’s wife’s dad having a closeted homosexual affair with a writer (not even sure it was cheever)

      when i think “john cheever” i think, like, “dusty recliner in an old person’s house,” or like, “brazil nuts”

      have i been unfair to him

  8. deadgod

      Kyle’s comment feels to me like he’s happy to take advantage of this opportunity to celebrate Cheever’s achievements–‘defend’? there’s no defensiveness in Kyle’s suit–.

      He’s surely not attacking irony per se or altogether, but rather, provisionally disdaining the particular irony of casting this victory mantle over this broad sneer (provided that that’s what David is doing or readers are reading). –that is, not that it’s always regrettable to pose an incongruity between semantic content and meaning-in-context, but rather, that it’s foolish to mock a fine artist uncomprehendingly. In my view, “stale, dry, and leathery” won’t be made to stick to Cheever. (My guess from a distance: Kyle’s a fan of irony.)

      Kyle does take this Rorschlock list in stride with “the joke’s on whomever responds in whatever way”. It’s a clever, funny ambiguity that David’s made.

  9. deadgod

      Of these stories, the two that I love the most are The Chaste Clarissa and The Golden Age. They’re each ugly and self-lacerating, but written in smoothly jeweled sentences, so that as you read them, you might laugh, complicit (perhaps without malice) in their contempt. Their scorn isn’t all of the world, or even all of ‘the city and the suburbs’. But having had something made present as well as Cheever has done is a treat, at least.

  10. John Minichillo

      Cheever, after being expelled from high school, wrote a story about it that was published in the The New Republic, and the editor there helped him get a spot at Yaddo. He moved to NY at 18 to go be a writer. He was the first offered a first-look contract from the NYer. His collection of stories won a Pullitzer when that never happened. After living his life as a womanizer, notorious alcoholic and pill popper, he got sober, taught writing at Sing Sing, wrote his best book yet, and then he died. Respect that shit, hipsters.

  11. Mark Cugini

      yes.

  12. mimi

      feel like an UnderA’Cheever

  13. deadgod

      Here’s a different version of Cheever’s “early life”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cheever#Early_life_and_education .

      Here’s a moving reminiscence of Cheever “at Sing Sing” (with a couple of good comments): http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/08/john-cheever-at-sing-sing-prison.html .

      The earliest short-story collection to win the Pulitzer fiction prize that I could find is Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (’48). (McPherson’s Elbow Room won the year before Cheever’s Stories.) Of the same kind of collections as Cheever’s, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (’66) and The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (’70) won before his did.

      Hipsters might ignore the unhappy life and glad late clarity and respect Cheever’s great writing.

  14. Brooks Sterritt

      i don’t know the purpose of your comment, but i’m sure you’re being ironic.

  15. Brooks Sterritt

      cheever was a hipster–he used a typewriter

  16. reynard seifert

      you’ve put me in an absurd but realistic situation, brooks, how cheever of you

  17. bartleby_taco

      ok. what are 3-8 cheever stories i should read?

  18. mimi

      The Swimmer

  19. Kyle Minor

      Goodbye, My Brother
      The Swimmer
      The Five Forty-Eight
      A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear
      The Lowboy
      The Country Husband

      It’s also worth skimming the beginning and ending sentences of all the stories in the red book.

      The next thing to read is Cheever’s Journals, then Falconer.

  20. bartleby_taco

      Thank you, Kyle!

  21. A D Jameson

      File under “A Cheever.”

  22. A D Jameson

      Bullet Park is one of my favorite novels ever, and one of the stranger novels of the late 60s, I’d argue.

  23. deadgod
  24. ZZZZZIPPP

      GET THE COLLECTED AND START AT THE END

  25. Vol. 1 Brooklyn | Morning Bites: Elmore Leonard’s Birthday, Tama Janowitz Interviewed, John Cheever’s New Yorker Fiction, Gladwell Responds, and More

      […] In case you were ever curious about about all the fiction John Cheever ever contributed to the New Yorker… […]

  26. mimi

      that lessing vid just made my morning cup o’ joe, deaders, thanks

      we’ve also learned that our neighbor’s neighbor’s neighbor won in medicine/physiology

      http://elcerrito.patch.com/groups/local-connections/p/uc-professor-randy-schekman-wins-nobel-elcerrito

      folks here are celebrating/giving props by donning [fake] ‘ironic’ ginger ‘staches (really!)

      do you want to know what a Nobel Prize win in Berkeley really means? it means a lifetime free parking space on campus labeled ‘NP’ – most of which stand empty all day, as the NP’ers are all walking/riding their bikes/taking the shuttle to work, causing mild annoyance amongst parking space coveters