John Cheever

Cheever was expelled from a Massachusetts boarding school at seventeen for smoking, turned the experience into his first published story, and spent the following decades in New York and then the Westchester suburbs, publishing steadily in The New Yorker while privately battling alcoholism and a closeted bisexuality that surfaces only obliquely in his fiction.

His late novel Falconer, written partly from his own experience teaching writing in Sing Sing prison, marked a raw, redemptive turn after his sobriety. The Stories of John Cheever, collecting five decades of magazine work, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 and sold remarkably well for a story collection.

His daughter Susan and son Benjamin both became writers; his journals, published after his death, revealed a far darker private life than his polished suburban fiction ever let show. He died in 1982.