The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [0]
The Wapshot
Chronicle
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
About the Author
Also by John Cheever
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part Two
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Part Four
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The History of Vintage
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409088899
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Vintage 1998
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Copyright © John Cheever 1954, 1956, 1957
John Cheever has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain by Harper in 1957 First published by Vintage in 1998
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099275275
To M with love:
and with best wishes to practically everybody else I know
THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE
John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1978 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly before his death in 1982 he was awarded the National Medal for Literature.
ALSO BY JOHN CHEEVER
Novels
The Wapshot Scandal
Falconer
Bullet Park
Oh What a Paradise It Seems
Short Stories
The Way Some People Live
The Enormous Radio
The Housebreaker of Shady Hill
Some People, Places and Things
That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel
The Brigadier and the Golf Widow
The World of Apples
The Stories of John Cheever
Journals
The Journals
Letters
The Letters of John Cheever (edited by Benjamin Cheever)
Four chapters of this book appeared in a slightly different form in The New Yorker magazine and the author is indebted to the editors of The New Yorker.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
St. Botolphs was an old place, an old river town. It had been an inland port in the great days of the Massachusetts sailing fleets and now it was left with a factory that manufactured table silver and a few other small industries. The natives did not consider that it had diminished