American writer John Cheever was BOTD in 1912. Born in Quincy, Massachusetts to a prominent New England family, he had a turbulent adolescence, marked by the failure of his parents’ marriage and financial difficulties. At 17, he was expelled from his prestigious private school, an experience recounted in his short story Expelled, published in The New Republic in 1930. During the Great Depression, he lived between New York City and the Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, and began publishing his stories in The New Yorker. In 1941, he married Mary Winternitz, with whom he had three children. He enlisted in the US Army in 1942, though was reassigned to the Signal Corps to write scripts for training films. His literary breakthrough came with his 1947 story The Enormous Radio, a Kafkaesque tale about a young couple with a radio that broadcasts the conversations of their neighbours. Its success led to Cheever being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1951, he and his family moved to Beechwood in suburban New York where he pursued writing full-time. He became one of the most acclaimed writers of mid-century America, nicknamed “the Chekhov of the Suburbs” for his lyrical, surrealistic portraits of white middle-class ennui. His best-known story The Swimmer, a disturbing, time-jumping portrait of an alcoholic suburbanite, was published in The New Yorker in 1964 and successfully filmed in 1968 starring Burt Lancaster. Like many of his characters, Cheever struggled with alcoholism for much of his life. Married with three children, he had a number of affairs with men and women, including composer Ned Rorem and actress Hope Lange. His longest affair was with his student Max Zimmer, who lived in the Cheever family home. Later in life, his marriage, family life and creative work declined under the strain of his alcoholism, though his reputation was revived by the publication of his Collected Short Stories, winning the 1979 Pulitzer Prize. He died in 1982 aged 70. His daughter Susan’s memoir Home Before Dark, published after his death, revealed details of Cheever’s bisexuality and her parents’ “European” (open) marriage.