These stories," writes Cheever in the preface to this Pulitzer Prize winning collection of stories, "seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationary store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like 'the Cleveland Chicken,' set sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are.
The fortunes and foibles of the Wapshots - the patriarch Leander, his wife Sarah and two sons, and Aunt Honora. The story moves from a small New England river town to New York and Europe; from the early 20th century to the 1960s. John Cheever won the 1958 National Book Award for "Chronicle".
