And once a reader examines the letters, the journals, the interviews, and Donaldson's 1988 biography, Cheever seems to contradict himself. Certainly much of Cheever's fiction comes directly out of his own life experience and is autobiographical, but autobiographical in the patterns of those experiences rather than echoes of actual events. Most importantly, Cheever's fictive treatments of these events create rather than record what those experiences meant to him. What strikes the reader of Cheever most is the incomparable way in which he transforms the commonplace events of daily life into some of the wittiest and most profoundly moving stories in modern American literature.
John Cheever was born into a middle-class New England family on 27 May 1912 in the seaside community of Quincy, Massachusetts, a few miles south of Boston. His mother, an English-born woman named Mary Devereaux Liley, was ten years younger than John's father, Frederick Lincoln Cheever. Both of his parents figure throughout his fiction but are never so identified. Rather, they appear as types--the hard-drinking, charming, storytelling, father figure in conflict with the emotionally reserved, class-conscious workaholic mother or grandmother. They are frequently involved in the fall of a respected family from a socially prominent position because of the father's irresponsible behavior in financial or sexual matters.
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