John Cheever's journals reveal the inner life of this remarkable writer and the contradictions that drove him. He loved his wife and their children, but was acutely lonely; he loved women, but he also loved men; he hated himself for his drinking, but for much of his life was dependent upon it; he was a great writer, but one whose acute levels of perception often crippled him as a person. His journals are candid, beautiful and often startling.
John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and he went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1978 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly before his death in 1982 he was awarded the National Medal for Literature.
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"One of the most compelling and intimate books you'll ever read" Independent "Beautifully written, lyrically spiritual, sexually candid memoirs" Mail on Sunday "Cheever's journals include the struggle for recognition, the problem-drinking and covert homosexuality of a public figure and, finally, cancer. His intelligence and honesty powerfully communicate the sense of life as an urgent predicament" Sunday Times "These diaries are so painfully personal...that they were not published until after his death. But they also concentrate the true essence of what made his short stories great" Sunday Express "John Cheever understood fallibility and that made for the greatness in his writing" The Times
