Cheever Added to Writers Hall of Fame

New York, NY (June 13, 2012) - Author John Cheever, whose connection to Yaddo spanned nearly 40 years, has been inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

Cheever, sometimes referred to as “the Chekhov of the suburbs,” largely set his fiction in Manhattan’s Upper East Side and in Westchester. He enjoyed numerous working residencies at Yaddo, including several Depression summers and at least one working as the boatman ferrying artist guests back and forth across nearby Lake George to an island property that housed some of Yaddo’s earliest artists. In later years, Cheever served on Yaddo’s board. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award. Shortly before his death in 1982, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his many other works are The Enormous Radio and Other Stories, The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal, and Falconer.

Cheever was among 14 authors honored at a dinner ceremony held at the Princeton Club in New York City to celebrate the new additions to the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. The other 2012 inductees were Hart Crane, E.L. Doctorow, Edna Ferber, Pete Hamill, Washington Irving, Henry James, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Tuchman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Wright.

The Empire State Center for the Book, which is affiliated with the Library of Congress Center for the Book, oversees the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Plans are under way to house the New York State Writers Hall of Fame at the New York State Library in Albany.