![]() John Cheever, the author of five novels and of many-a hundred and twenty-one-of the most brilliant and memorable short stories this magazine has ever printed, died in 1982, at the age of seventy, and in the years since an unusually full and frank wealth of biographical material has accumulated: a memoiristic biography, “Home Before Dark” (1984), by his daughter, Susan a collection of letters, edited and annotated by his son Benjamin (1988) a four-hundred-page biography by Scott Donaldson (1988) and, an embarrassment of riches and a richesse of embarrassment, the forty-three hundred pages, mostly typed single-space, of Cheever’s private journals, stored at Harvard’s Houghton Library and mined, by Robert Gottlieb, for six excerpts published in The New Yorker between August of 1990 and August of 1991. On the one hand, Blake Bailey’s biography “Cheever: A Life” (Knopf $35) is a triumph of thorough research and unblinkered appraisal-a seven-hundred-and-seventy-page labor of, if not love, faithful adherence. ![]()
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