The Music Teacher (short Story)
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The Music Teacher (short Story)
"The Music Teacher" is a short story by John Cheever which first appeared in ''The New Yorker'' on November 21, 1959. The work was included in the short fiction collection '' The Brigadier and the Golf Widow'' (1964), published by Harper and Row. The story is one Cheever's most anthologized works, and regarded as "a genuine masterpiece" of short fiction. "The Music Teacher" is included in ''The Stories of John Cheever'' (1978). Plot The ten-year marriage of the Setons is slowly but inexorably unraveling. Seton (only his last name is used to identify him), provides a modest income for his wife Jessica and their three young daughters. Jessica is deeply discontented with her role as homemaker, and expresses it through neglecting to maintain good order and discipline among her children. Whenever Seton arrives home from work, Jessica regularly presents the family with burnt and unpalatable meals, distracted by other domestic responsibilities. Seton is dismayed and deeply troubled. ...
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John Cheever
John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American short story writer and novelist. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born; and Italy, especially Rome. His short stories included " The Enormous Radio", "Goodbye, My Brother", " The Five-Forty-Eight", "The Country Husband", and " The Swimmer", and he also wrote five novels: ''The Wapshot Chronicle'' (National Book Award, 1958),from the Awards 50-year anniversary publications and from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) '' The Wapshot Scandal'' (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), '' Bullet Park'' (1969), '' Falconer'' (1977) and a novella '' Oh What a Paradise It Seems'' (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous soc ...
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The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans. Although its reviews and events listings often focus on the Culture of New York City, cultural life of New York City, ''The New Yorker'' has a wide audience outside New York and is read internationally. It is well known for its illustrated and often topical covers, its commentaries on popular culture and eccentric American culture, its attention to modern fiction by the inclusion of Short story, short stories and literary reviews, its rigorous Fact-checking, fact checking and copy editing, its journalism on politics and social issues, and its single-panel cartoons sprinkled throughout each issue. Overview and history ''The New Yorker'' was founded by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a ''The New York Times, N ...
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The Brigadier And The Golf Widow
''The Brigadier and the Golf Widow'' is a collection of short fiction by John Cheever, published by Harper and Row in 1964. These sixteen works were first published individually in ''The New Yorker''.Bailey, 2009 p. 1026-1027 The works also appears in ''The Stories of John Cheever'' (1978). Several stories in this volume are among the most frequently anthologized of Cheever's work, notably " The Swimmer", "The Angel of the Bridge", "Clementina", and "The Music Teacher." Stories The date of publication in ''The New Yorker'' appears in parenthesis. * "The Chaste Clarissa" (June 14, 1952) * "Just One More Time" (October 8, 1955) * "The Bella Lingua" (March 1, 1958) * " The Music Teacher" (November 21, 1959) * "A Woman Without a Country" (December 12, 1959) * "Clementina" (May 7, 1960) * "The Seaside Houses" (July 29, 1961) * "The Angel of the Bridge" (October 21, 1961) * "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow" (November 11, 1961) * "A Vision of the World" (September 29, 1962) * " Reuni ...
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Harper And Row
Harper is an American publishing house, the flagship imprint of global publisher HarperCollins based in New York City. History J. & J. Harper (1817–1833) James Harper and his brother John, printers by training, started their book publishing business J. & J. Harper in New York City in 1817. Their two brothers, Joseph Wesley and Fletcher, joined them in the mid-1820s. Harper & Brothers (1833–1962) The company changed its name to "Harper & Brothers" in 1833. The headquarters of the publishing house were located at 331 Pearl Street, facing Franklin Square in Lower Manhattan (about where the Manhattan approach to the Brooklyn Bridge lies today). Harper & Brothers began publishing ''Harper's New Monthly Magazine'' in New York City in 1850. The brothers also published ''Harper's Weekly'' (starting in New York City in June 1857), '' Harper's Bazar'' (starting in New York City in November 2, 1867), and ''Harper's Young People'' (starting in New York City in 1879). George B. M ...
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The Stories Of John Cheever
''The Stories of John Cheever'' is a 1978 short story collection by American author John Cheever. It contains some of his most famous stories, including " The Enormous Radio", "Goodbye, My Brother", "The Country Husband", " The Five-Forty-Eight" and " The Swimmer". It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1979 and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award."National Book Awards – 1981"
. Retrieved 2012-03-14
(with essays by Willie Perdomo, Matthew Pitt, and Robert Wilder from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog).
Cheever's ''Stories'' won the ...
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Crone
In folklore, a crone is an old woman who may be characterized as disagreeable, malicious, or sinister in manner, often with magical or supernatural associations that can make her either helpful or obstructive. The Crone is also an archetypal figure, a Wise Woman. As a character type, the crone shares characteristics with the hag. The word became further specialized as the third aspect of the Triple Goddess popularized by Robert Graves and subsequently in some forms of neopaganism, particularly Wicca in which she symbolizes the Dark Goddess, the dark of the moon, the end of a cycle; together with the Mother and the Maiden she represents part of the circle of life. In New Age and feminist spiritual circles, a "Croning" is a ritual rite of passage into an era of wisdom, freedom, and personal power. According to scholar Clarissa Pinkola Estés, the Crone is "the one who sees far, who looks into the spaces between the worlds and can literally see what is coming, what has been, and w ...
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Demeter
In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Demeter (; Attic: ''Dēmḗtēr'' ; Doric: ''Dāmā́tēr'') is the Olympian goddess of the harvest and agriculture, presiding over crops, grains, food, and the fertility of the earth. Although she is mostly known as a grain goddess, she also appeared as a goddess of health, birth, and marriage, and had connections to the Greek Underworld, Underworld. She is also called Deo (). In Greek tradition, Demeter is the second child of the Titans Rhea (mythology), Rhea and Cronus, and sister to Hestia, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. Like her other siblings but Zeus, she was swallowed by her father as an infant and rescued by Zeus. Through her brother Zeus, she became the mother of Persephone, a fertility goddess. One of the most notable Homeric Hymns, the ''Homeric Hymn to Demeter'', tells the story of Persephone's abduction by Hades and Demeter's search for her. When Hades, the King of the Underworld, wished to make Persephone his wife ...
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Hecate
Hecate or Hekate, , ; grc-dor, Ἑκάτᾱ, Hekátā, ; la, Hecatē or . is a goddess in ancient Greek religion and mythology, most often shown holding a pair of torches, a key, snakes, or accompanied by dogs, and in later periods depicted as three-formed or triple-bodied. She is variously associated with crossroads, entrance-ways, night, light, magic, witchcraft, the Moon, knowledge of herbs and poisonous plants, graves, ghosts, necromancy, and sorcery.Seyffert, s.vHecate/ref>d'Este, Sorita & Rankine, David, Hekate Liminal Rites, Avalonia, 2009. Her earliest appearance in literature was in Hesiod's ''Theogony'' in the 8th century BCE as a goddess of great honour with domains in sky, earth, and sea. Her place of origin is debated by scholars, but she had popular followings amongst the witches of Thessaly and an important sanctuary among the Carian Greeks of Asia Minor in Lagina. Her oldest known representation was found in Selinunte, in Sicily. Hecate was one of several de ...
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Blake Bailey
John Blake Bailey (born July 1, 1963) is an American writer and educator. Bailey is known for his literary biographies of Richard Yates, John Cheever, Charles Jackson, and Philip Roth. He is the editor of the Library of America omnibus editions of Cheever's stories and novels. In April 2021, his agency dropped him after several of his former eighth grade students came forward with accounts of rape and sexual abuse committed when they were adults. Background Bailey grew up in Oklahoma City and attended high school at Bishop McGuinness Catholic High School, where he was friends with another future author, Dan Fagin. He was a student at Tulane University, from which he graduated in 1985. Bailey and his family lost their house and most of their possessions in Hurricane Katrina, an experience he wrote about in a series of articles for '' Slate''. In 2009–2010, Bailey was Writer in Residence at The College of William and Mary in Virginia. From 2010 to 2016, he was the Mina ...
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The Library Of America
The Library of America (LOA) is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature. Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LOA has published over 300 volumes by authors ranging from Mark Twain to Philip Roth, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Saul Bellow, including selected writing of several U.S. presidents. Overview and history The ''Bibliothèque de la Pléiade'' ("La Pléiade") series published in France provided the model for the LOA, which was long a dream of critic and author Edmund Wilson. The initial organizers included American academic Daniel Aaron,Cromie, William J., Ken Gewertz, Corydon Ireland, and Alvin Powell"Honorary degrees awarded at Commencement's Morning Exercises", ''Harvard Gazette''. June 7, 2007. Lawrence Hughes, Helen Honig Meyer, and Roger W. Straus Jr. The initial board of advisers included Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, R. W. B. Lewis, Robert Coles, Irving Howe, and Eudora Wel ...
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Twayne Publishers
Gale is a global provider of research and digital learning resources. The company is based in Farmington Hills, Michigan, west of Detroit. It has been a division of Cengage since 2007. The company, formerly known as Gale Research and the Gale Group, is active in research and educational publishing for public, academic, and school libraries, and businesses. The company is known for its full-text magazine and newspaper databases, Gale OneFile (formerly known as Infotrac), and other online databases subscribed by libraries, as well as multi-volume reference works, especially in the areas of religion, history, and social science. Founded in Detroit, Michigan, in 1954 by Frederick Gale Ruffner Jr., the company was acquired by the International Thomson Organization (later the Thomson Corporation) in 1985 before its 2007 sale to Cengage. History In 1998, Gale Research merged with Information Access Company and Primary Source Media, two companies also owned by Thomson, to form the G ...
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1959 Short Stories
Events January * January 1 - Cuba: Fulgencio Batista flees Havana when the forces of Fidel Castro advance. * January 2 - Lunar probe Luna 1 was the first man-made object to attain escape velocity from Earth. It reached the vicinity of Earth's Moon, and was also the first spacecraft to be placed in heliocentric orbit. * January 3 ** The three southernmost atolls of the Maldive Islands, Maldive archipelago (Addu Atoll, Huvadhu Atoll and Fuvahmulah island) United Suvadive Republic, declare independence. ** Alaska is admitted as the 49th U.S. state. * January 4 ** In Cuba, rebel troops led by Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos enter the city of Havana. ** Léopoldville riots: At least 49 people are killed during clashes between the police and participants of a meeting of the ABAKO Party in Kinshasa, Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo. * January 6 ** Fidel Castro arrives in Havana. ** The International Maritime Organization is inaugurated. * January 7 – The United States reco ...
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