“The Wapshot Scandal (TIME, Jan. 24), the second of his two novels, is selling at a brisk 2,000 copies a week, and has already topped the total sales of his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle—although the Chronicle won the National Book Award in 1958. Movie rights to both have been bought for $75,000, but it seems likely that any movie will mirror merely the realism. Cheever has been long acknowledged as a master of the short story, of which he has written over a hundred…Ultimately, Cheever tries to ‘celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.’ Says he: ‘One has an impulse to bring glad tidings to someone. My sense of literature is a sense of giving, not a diminishment. I know almost no pleasure greater than having a piece of fiction draw together disparate incidents so that they relate to one another and confirm that feeling that life itself is a creative process, that one thing is put purposefully upon another, that what is lost in one encounter is replenished in the next, and that we possess some power to make sense of what takes place.’” (Mar. 27, 1964)
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