In these journals Cheever does not spare himself or others. Bailey had access to Cheever's private journals, which run to over 4,000 pages, and he quotes from them extensively. It contains too much information on its subject without providing enough perspective. By this standard, Blake Bailey's life of John Cheever falls short. Forster, handle their subjects with respect without ignoring their flaws, and examine their lives in the context of the world in which they lived. The best literary biographies, such as Ted Morgan's life of Somerset Maugham and P. Now Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life displays in painful detail how tormented Cheever was by his sexuality throughout his life. His father invited an abortionist to dinner before Cheever’s. The publication of The Journals of John Cheever in 1991 revealed his homosexual propensities. Born in Quincy, Massachusetts, Cheever was the second son of a once-prosperous alcoholic shoe salesman and a domineering mother. Like many 20th-century writers whose lives have been thoroughly documented in journals, interviews, medical records, and reports by those who knew him, Cheever cannot escape his own biography. References to homosexuality appear sporadically throughout Cheever's work, and a love affair between two men is at the core of his final major novel, 1977's Falconer. JOHN CHEEVER, who died in 1982, has a place in the American literary canon, primarily for the brilliant short stories he wrote from the 1940's to the 1970's.
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