John Cheever

So help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I expect as if the force of life were centrifugal and threw one further ...

From Nabokov’s “Inspiration”

Here he selects a couple American stories that he adores and picks a particular passage filled with sine qua non inspiration: Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge. From a small number of A-plus stories ...

American Writers of the 1950′s