The First Suburbanite
By CHARLES McGRATH writing in the NYT, February 27, 2009

WHEN JOHN CHEEVER DIED in June 1982, his literary reputation seemed as secure as literary reputations get. You would have bought shares in it if you speculated in such things. He was a widely acknowledged master of the short story, in a league with Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Updike, who said that Cheever wrote “as if with the quill from the wing of an angel.”

His collected stories, which came out in 1978, were on the best-seller list — a place where story collections very seldom turn up — for months and went on to win both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His 1977 novel, “Falconer,” even climbed to No. 1 on the list and clung there for a while — an unusually lofty perch for a literary work that was about a drug-addicted fratricide. In 1978, Harvard gave Cheever, who never graduated from high school, an honorary degree. Critics frequently talked about the luminous, indelible beauty of his prose.

Photo by Nancy Crampton
Some Things in Common - Cheever with his daughter, Susan, in 1976. She is also a writer and has chronicled her own bouts with alcoholism and sex addiction.

But just 25 years later Cheever has largely faded from the literary map. “The Stories of John Cheever” sells about 5,000 copies a year now — not bad, but not the numbers you’d expect from a classic. “Falconer” and “The Wapshot Chronicle,” Cheever’s other great novel, which made the Modern Library’s list of the top 100 English-language novels of the 20th century, struggle to stay in print at all.

His stock will doubtless enjoy an uptick in the following weeks, when the Library of America, the closest thing we have to an official canon, reissues most of his stories and all five of his novels in two volumes edited by Blake Bailey, and when Bailey’s own biography of Cheever comes out. That may be a defining moment, in fact — Cheever’s best chance, and maybe his last one for a while, to join the ranks of the great 20th-century American writers.

No reputation lasts forever. As Julian Barnes gloomily writes in his new memoir, “Nothing to Be Frightened Of”: “First, you fall out of print, consigned to the recesses of the secondhand bookshop and dealer’s Web site. Then a brief revival, if you’re lucky, with a title or two reprinted; then another fall, and a period when a few graduate students, pushed for a thesis topic, will wearily turn your pages and wonder why you wrote so much.”

The full piece at NYT online.