John Cheever

(1912 - 1982)

While apartment-sitting for Walker Evans and writing synopses for MGM in 1935, John Cheever published the first of his 121 stories that would appear in The New Yorker. Unable to complete his first novel, he had to make money by writing in the genre that had made him famous, a circumstance he regretted. “I want to write short stories,” he said in 1947, “like I want to fuck a chicken.” Called “the Chekhov of the suburbs,” Cheever in 1957 published The Wapshot Chronicle, for which he received a National Book Award.