Cheever, John

American author born in Quincy, Massachusetts. Cheever’s father owned a shoe factory, but he fell on hard times in the financial crash of 1929 and Cheever’s mother, and Englishwoman by the name of Mary Lily, was forced to provide for the family by running a small gift shop, to her son’s great embarrassment. Chambers attended Thayer Academy from which he was expelled in 1930 for smoking cigarettes. He did extremely badly at school and he was profoundly distressed about his father’s drinking and the breaking up of his family. However, he had won a short story competition in The Boston Herald, and in 1930 his first short story, entitled Expelled, was published in the New Republic. In 1932, his father lost what remained of his business in the Kruger crash and he and his wife separated.