John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. His fiction is set mainly in Manhattan, Westchester, New England and Italy, and it explores the split between social facades and inner corruption.
His novels include The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) and Falconer (1977), and his best-known stories include The Enormous Radio, The Five-Forty-Eight and The Swimmer. The Stories of John Cheever (1978) won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He died in Ossining, New York, in 1982.