The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

" Cheever's son Benjamin was born on May 4 1948. Cheever spent the summer of 1934 at Yaddo which would serve as a second home for much of his life.

Botolphs in the Wapshot novels) characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories The Stories of John Cheever won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award.