San Antonio College Library

Seeking to correct the misapprehension of Cheever as a mere suburban satirist, Hunt explores the magical properties of his fiction - the way particular events and characters represent the unseen, the universal and the mythical. He considers the effect of Christian themes on Cheever's work, investigates the significance of love in his vision and analyzes his themes and style. He argues that Cheever themes -- confinement and travel, memory and forgetting,...

Also includes criticism of William Styron, Harvey Swados, Norman Mailer, Frederick Buechner, Bernard Malamud, Ralph Ellison, Herbert Gold, John Cheever, and J.P. Donleavy.

"Of the eight American Nobel Prize winners in literature, three--Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill and William Faulkner--were alcoholic drinkers, and two--Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck--were hard drinkers. Almost all critical comment about these writers has treated their drinking habits a somehow separate from their work. Thomas Gilmore argues that the result is neither good biography nor good literary criticism. He shows how the drinking and the...