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JOHN CHEEVER'S FIRST BOOK
The Way Some People Live Cheever "has told us many things about America in this century: about the untidy lives lived in tidy households, about betrayal and deception and lust and the wounds of the heart, but also about faith and the blessings of simple companionship and the abiding reality of love. Only the greatest of writers have this gift: which is to write of these familiar and homely matters with such understated but powerful insight as to cause us to pause and realize, in wonder, that we have been told secrets about ourselves that we have never known." -William Styron FIRST EDITION of John Cheever's rare first book, the collection of stories that would help launch his career. "The Way Some People Live, Cheever's collection of stories, was published on March 8, 1943... The book contained thirty stories arranged more or less by chronology. The first twenty-four derived from the prewar period; the last six were written after Pearl Harbor... and almost all of them came from the pages of The New Yorker... Writing in the Saturday Review, [Struthers] Burt called The Way Some People Live 'the best volume of short stories' he had come across in a long time and 'Of Love: A testimony' 'one of the best love stories he had ever read'. After the war, he predicted, Cheever would become 'one of the most distinguished writers, not only as a short story writer but as a novelist' and perhaps even as a playwright. He had all the requisite qualities: 'the sense of drama in ordinary events and people; the underlying and universal importance of the outwardly unimportant; a deep feeling for the perversities and contradictions, the worth and unexpected dignity of life, its ironies, comedies, and tragedies'" (Scott Donaldson, John Cheever). New York: Random House, 1943. Octavo, original red buckram, original dust jacket. Book fine, dust jacket with very slight toning to spine and light edgewear. $1500. |
