John Cheever's Enormous Influences

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Enormous Influences
How does life circumstances and experiences influence and affect what a great writer publishes? This is very important question one should ask themselves before delving into any reading. John Cheever, a renowned short story writer, novelist, and story teller, is not exempt of this rule. One of his most famous works called “The Enormous Radio”, is a great work to judge how strongly Cheever’s influenced his work. In this story, the exceptionally normal Westcott family buys an expensive radio. Once they begin using it, they realize their neighbors interactions can be heard on the stations. As the story progresses, Mrs. Westcott begins to obsess over the radio and hearing all of her neighbors’ private lives (especially their …show more content…

One of the problems he dealt with was economic issues. He never seemed to fall into economic despair, but at times he and his family had to scrape by like many middle class families do. Scott Donaldson in his book “John Cheever: A Biography”, discusses many things that influenced Cheever’s writing. One of which was Cheever’s economic experience. Donaldson described Cheever and his wife Mary as early in marriage being, “Financially […] neither well off nor improvised.” (Donaldson 93) Cheever and his wife never fell into the lower class or poverty, but they did have issues much like many middle class families. The Cheever’s felt the issue of being stuck in the middle. During these year Cheever’s wife worked a publishing job to ensure the two made it by. The middle class economic struggle was definitely present in Cheever’s …show more content…

It is not totally exactly when his abuse started, but it definitely influenced his life. For a long period of time, Cheever tried his best to hide his issues and keep it secret. He worried what would happen if people found out his struggle, and eventually he had had enough. Samuel Coale wrote about John Cheever’s Struggle with alcohol in his book “John Cheever”. He recorded that “he (Cheever) was fighting a losing battle against severe and chronic alcoholism” so he decided to go, “for a month to Smithers, an alcoholic rehabilitation center in New York City” (Coale 8). During this time he no longer cared to keep his struggle a secret and admitted and reported his alcoholism in many interviews. After spending a month at Smithers Cheever left a fully rehabilitated man. He felt like he had let those he cared about down and he desired to no longer have to bear the weight of his secret and both of these feelings he attributed to his recovery. Both of those reasons were his spoken motivations for his recovery. The greatest unspoken motivation for him was probably his near death experience with a heart attack around this time. Cheever struggled but eventually he championed and overcame his alcohol

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