Publication Order of Wapshot Books
| The Wapshot Chronicle | 1957 |
| The Wapshot Scandal | 1964 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Bullet Park | 1969 |
| Falconer | 1977 |
| Oh What a Paradise It Seems | 1982 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| The Way Some People Live | 1943 |
| The Enormous Radio and Other Stories | 1953 |
| The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories | 1958 |
| Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel | 1961 |
| The Brigadier and the Golf Widow | 1964 |
| The World of Apples | 1973 |
| The Stories of John Cheever | 1978 |
| Thirteen Uncollected Stories by John Cheever / Fall River and Other Uncollected Stories | 1994 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| The Letters of John Cheever | 1988 |
| The Journals of John Cheever | 1991 |
About John Cheever
John Cheever (1912 to 1982) was an American short story writer and novelist whose fiction is set largely in Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs and old New England villages. His collection “The Stories of John Cheever” (1978) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and his first novel, “The Wapshot Chronicle” (1957), won the National Book Award.
Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, on 27 May 1912, the son of a shoe salesman who lost most of his money in the mid-1920s. He left Thayer Academy in 1930 and turned the experience into “Expelled”, a piece published in The New Republic when he was 18. In 1935 The New Yorker bought his story “Buffalo”, the first of many it would publish. He married Mary Winternitz in 1941, enlisted in the army in 1942, and saw his first collection, “The Way Some People Live”, published in 1943.
His reputation rests chiefly on stories such as “The Enormous Radio” (1947), about a radio that broadcasts the private conversations of an apartment building’s tenants, “Goodbye, My Brother”, “The Five-Forty-Eight”, “The Country Husband” and “The Swimmer” (1964), which was filmed with Burt Lancaster. He moved to Westchester in 1951 and to a farmhouse in Ossining, on the Hudson, in 1961.
“The Wapshot Chronicle” and its sequel “The Wapshot Scandal” (1964) concern an eccentric family from the Massachusetts fishing village of St. Botolphs; the sequel won the William Dean Howells Medal. “Bullet Park” (1969) drew a damaging front-page review in The New York Times Book Review, and Cheever’s alcoholism worsened until he entered a rehabilitation unit in 1975, after which he never drank again. “Falconer” (1977), the story of a university professor and drug addict imprisoned for killing his brother, spent three weeks at number one on the New York Times best seller list. “The Stories of John Cheever” followed in 1978 and sold 125,000 copies in hardback.
His last work of fiction, the novella “Oh What a Paradise It Seems”, was published in March 1982. That April he received the National Medal for Literature, and he died of cancer in Ossining on 18 June 1982. His letters, edited by his son Benjamin, were published in 1988 and his journals in 1991, and “Thirteen Uncollected Stories” appeared in 1994 after a long legal dispute over his early work. The Library of America issued his collected stories and complete novels in 2009.