John Cheever
John William Cheever was an American short story writer and novelist. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set on 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.
Background
- Born in
- Quincy
- Educated at
- Quincy High SchoolThayer Academy
- Awards
- 🏆 National Book Award for Fiction🏆 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction🏆 O. Henry Award🏆 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction🏆 Guggenheim Fellowship
Trending & Selected Quotes
Trending topics shown first"Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil not the strength to choose between the two."
"The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man’s complexity and the strength and decency of his longings. Where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogeth…"
"The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, nearsightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another."
"When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand."
"The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness."
Works & Publications
No works or publications documented yet.
Timeline
1912
Born
Birth1982
Died
Death
Influenced By
Thinkers whose ideas shaped John's philosophy
No known influences documented.
Influenced
Thinkers whose work was shaped by John's ideas
Source Attribution
Information about John Cheever is sourced from curated knowledge bases and cross-referenced for accuracy. Influence relationships are scored by thematic overlap and historical plausibility.
Related Thinkers
See all →
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"What’s the use of a high school education if you can’t recall it when needed later on?"
— Hal Clement"So she might die here—well, she could have died anywhere, so who cared where? That didn’t interest her. Lif…"
— Justina Robson"Their heavenly harps a lower strain began, and in soft music mourn the fall of man."
— John Dryden"What can art accomplish? The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being."
— Svetlana Alexievich"The institutional scene in which American man has developed has lacked that accumulation from intervening s…"
— Daniel J. Boorstin"Language is the net that holds thought trapped within a particular culture. But if one could only strike th…"
— David Lodge
