Description
The years following World War II were decades of conjugal turmoil. Many women who managed to work and start careers during the war went back to being housewives. As their college attendance rates shot up, however, and as exposure to alternative life-styles increased, this period also became the gestation time for a new wave of the women's movement that began to crest in the late '60s and early '70s.
Our SDG concentrates on three authors who, while writing from a male perspective, capture some of the anguish experienced by conflicted women and daunted men. Philip Roth dubbed John Cheever (1912 - 1982) "an enchanted realist". Much the same can be said of Richard Yates (1926 - 1992), celebrated for Revolutionary Road (a novel made into a movie after his death, starring Kate Winslet) as well as for his lapidary short stories. While less well-known in his lifetime, John Williams (1922 -1994) achieved posthumous fame with the revival of Stoner, his one-of-a-kind tale of Midwestern melancholy.
"These stories," John Cheever wrote in the final collection of his own tales, "seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat." Variations on nostalgia in this vein can also be found in the work of Yates and Williams.
Another commonality is more subtle: all of our authors share a male sensibility keyed largely to a pre-'60s era, reflected in the stoicism and pathos of their tuning-fork prose. They all have a feel for what's askew behind the conformity and complacency of their contemporaries, including themselves. They all were alcoholics. They stumbled erratically through their relationships with women. Such themes provide the focus of our SDG.
Weekly Topics
1. Yates, Revolutionary Road, Part I, pp. 1 - 122
2. Yates, Revolutionary Road, Part II, pp. 123 - 222
3. Yates, Revolutionary Road, Part III, pp. 225 - end
4. Cheever, "The Enormous Radio" 9 pp. & "O Youth & Beauty" 16 pp. & "O City of Broken Dreams" 16 pp.
5. Cheever, "Torch Song" 15 pp. & "The Five-Forty-Eight" 12 pp. & "Country Husband" 22 pp.
6. Cheever, Stories, Cheever, "Goodbye, My Brother," 19 pp. & "The Wrysons," 6 pp. & "The Swimmer," 10 pp.
7. Williams, Stoner, Chapters 1 - 5, pp. 1 - 87.
8. Williams Stoner, Chapters 6 - 10, pp. 88 - 174.
9. Williams, Stoner, Chapter 11 - 15, pp. 175 - 275.
10. Richard Ford, "American Beauty" (c.1955) New York Times (April 9, 2000), 13pp.
Stewart O'Nan, "The Lost World of Richard Yates" Boston Review (October 1, 1999), 27pp.
Elizabeth Venant, "A Fresh Twist in the Road: For Novelist Richard Yates, a Specialist in Grim Irony, Late Fames's a Wicked Return," Los Angeles Times (July 9, 1989), 6 pp.
Edmund White, "The Strange Charms of John Cheever," New York Review of Books (April 8, 2010), 9 pp.
Morris Dickstein, "The Inner Lives of Men" [on Williams' Stoner], New York Times (June 17, 2007), 6 pp.
Tim Kreider, "The Greatest American Novel You've Never Heard Of," [on Williams' Stoner] New Yorker (October 20, 2013), 7 pp.
Lee Robson, "John Williams and the Canon That Might Have Been," New Yorker (March 11, 2019), 10 pp.
Bibliography
John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever (1978)
John Williams, Stoner (1965)
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (1961)
Richard Ford, "American Beauty (1955)" New York Times (April 9, 2000) 13 pp. (available online)
Stewart O'Nan, "The Lost World of Richard Yates," Boston Review (October 1, 1999), 27 pp. (available online)
Peter Tonguette, "At Home on Revolutionary Road," First Things (April, 2021), 4 pp.
Edmund White, "The Strange Charms of John Cheever," New York Review of Books (April 8, 2010), 9 pp. (available online)
Tim Kreider, "The Greatest American Novel You've Never Heard Of," [on Williams' Stoner] New Yorker (October 20, 2013), 7 pp. (available online)
Lee Robson, "John Williams and the Canon That Might Have Been," New Yorker (March 11, 2019), 10 pp. (available online)
Morris Dickstein, "The Inner Lives of Men" [on Williams' Stoner], New York Times (June 17, 2007), 6 pp. (available online)
Optional: The following literature is informative but not required. The biographies by Bailey are very readable. The letters of John Cheever are very frank. The biography of John Williams is worth browsing through.
Blake Bailey, Cheever (Vintage, 2009), 784 pp.
Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Picador, 2013), 704 pp.
Benjamin Cheever, ed., The Letters of John Cheever (Simon & Schuster, 1988).
Charles Shields, The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life (University of Texas Press, 2019).
