The Wapshot Scandal

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John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1978 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly before his death in 1982 he was awarded the National Medal for Literature.

All the characters in this work are fictional, as is much of the science.

A Foreword by a non-Cheever-scholar and infrequent reader of forewords:

I don’t know how certain books become canonical and others don’t. I know nothing about how these things work, what committees are formed, consulted, and what powers they wield, but I picture the process like a Pachinko. The book, playing the part of the silver lead ball – stay with me here – is sent through the top of the machine – the literary-cultural-academic machine – and it tinkles back and forth, subjected to popular and critical reaction, to revisionist theory, to changes in taste over a period of time, and eventually, if all goes well, it scores some points and stays in play. (I guess maybe I should have used a pinball metaphor. Your thoughts? Send them to 826 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110. Thank you in advance.)

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