John Cheever: Complete Novels (LOA #189)

""John Cheever is one of the few living American novelists," wrote John Gardner in 1977, "who might qualify as true artists. His work ranges from competent to awesome on all the grounds I would count: formal and technical mastery; educated intelligence; what I call 'artistic sincerity,' ... and last, validity, or what Tolstoy called, without apology, the artist's correct moral relation to his material." Here, for the first time in a single volume, are Cheever's complete novels, ranging from the ebullient family saga The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) and its sequel The Wapshot Scandal (1964) to the late triumph of Falconer (1977), an unsparing account of prison life that is also a searching meditation on the mysteries of erotic love." "In The Wapshot Chronicle, a novel more than fifteen years in the making, Cheever drew heavily on his New England background to create an uproarious canvas of a venerable Massachusetts family in decline. The craft that he honed in his masterful stories is --