Home Before Dark - Memoir of John Cheever

Published by Houghton Mifflin Boston 1984, hardcover, illustrated, 244 pages, inscription on endpaper, some wear to dust jacket, otherwise condition: very good.

The writer's eldest child draws on her father's journals and letters and on her own memories to construct a sympathetic, insightful account of Cheever's life, career, literary relationships, problems, and family life.

John Cheever (1912 1982) was an American short story writer and novelist. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born; and Italy, especially Rome. His short stories included "The Enormous Radio", "Goodbye, My Brother", "The Five-Forty-Eight", "The Country Husband", and "The Swimmer", and he also wrote five novels: The Wapshot Chronicle,  The Wapshot Scandal , Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella, Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982).

His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of bothlight and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia.

A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.