The journals of John Cheever

the long version

Three decades of writer John Cheever's journals giving an account of his family life, literary life, and emotional life. An outstanding literary event: the journals--begun in the late 1940s and continued through more than three decades--of a great American writer. John Cheever's journals provide, of course, peerless insights into the creation of his novels and stories. But they are equally the record of a complex, often dark, always closely observed inner world. No 20th-century American writer of comparable stature left such an unreservedly revealing and moving account of himself: his family life, his literary life, his emotional life. Its publication (more than 170,000 words from the massive complete text) brings us startlingly close to the writer and the man, and adds to Cheever's oeuvre a final, powerful, and beautiful work. With an introduction by his son Benjamin H. Cheever and an editor's note by Robert Gottlieb.--Adapted from dust jacket.