This collection provides broad coverage of Cheever and his work. Original essays discuss the basic facts of Cheever's life and critical reputation. Providing these facts is especially important in the case of the biography of a man who was not only prone to self-invention and self-mythologizing but whose version of his life was for so long accepted as fact and that has posthumously been complicated by often unflattering revelations about his personal life in his daughter's memoirs, in his published journals and in two biographies. Other essays discuss Cheever's decorous style and fragmented structure, and his fascination with language.