To outward appearances John Cheever was very much a child of the American twentieth century. Born just before World War I, he lived through the halcyon Jazz Age, suffered through the Depression, and served as a noncombatant in the army during World War II. Then in the middle decades he raised a family with his wife, Mary, as he pursued a thriving literary career in fiction. He experienced a personal decline of staggering proportions during the Vietnam era, but then finally, miraculously, managed to rehabilitate himself and his reputation before he died in 1982. It would be a disservice to Cheever and to American literature, however, to "locate" him so precisely. In his best short stories, he easily slips the bonds of time and place.

In a shaded corner of a Unitarian churchyard cemetery in the tiny Massachusetts village of Norwell, three small, black headstones mark the graves of...