John Cheever's Secrets

"About 20 miles south of Boston, under a big maple near a white clapboard church, John Cheever is buried next to his parents and brother. He's also buried under an accretion of myth and myth-busting. A restaurant on the edge of the cemetery, just yards from the family plot, calls itself the Cheever Tavern. Advertising a "tasteful setting," it invokes the great writer's mid-1960s public persona as the bard of suburbsville."

"The author of a dazzling flow of New Yorker stories, he was hailed on the cover of Time as "Ovid in Ossining" and presented in the accompanying article as a monogamously married father of three living in a grand house with the obligatory Labrador retrievers. "I had no idea that my father was anything but the country squire he pretended to be," Susan Cheever writes in her new book, When All the Men Wore Hats."

John Cheever is buried near Boston under a maple, beside his parents and brother. A nearby restaurant named Cheever Tavern markets his mid-1960s suburban persona. He gained fame for New Yorker stories and was portrayed as a monogamously married father living in a grand house with Labrador retrievers. He associated his stories with an earlier New York era of "river light" and hat-wearing. Later revelations exposed a private life of concealed homosexuality, sexual promiscuity with men and women, and severe alcoholism that required rehabilitation after near-fatal drinking episodes.

Read at The Atlantic