SOURCE: “The Hero on the 5:42: John Cheever's Short Fiction,” in Western Humanities Review, Vol. XXX, No. 2, Spring, 1976, pp. 147-52.

In the following essay, Moore argues that although Cheever's characters sometimes act in ways that seem futile and absurd, the fact that they create their own “legends” in a world that seems pointless makes them heroes.

Just about ten years ago John Aldridge wrote in Time to Murder and Create that Cheever was “one of the most grievously underdiscussed important writers we have at the present time.” He had been cursed with a “kind of good housekeeping seal of middlebrow literary approval”; he was said to be “a paid moralist of the button-down-collar Establishment.” Of course, as Aldridge added, “Cheever has … all along been unfortunate in the company his work has kept.” By that he meant The New Yorker, a Time magazine cover story, the National Book Award; Cheever...