''The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories'' is a collection of short fiction by John Cheever. Composed of eight short stories, the volume was first published by Harper & Bros. in 1958. Reissued by Hillman/MacFadden in 1961, the works are included in ''

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" ...

'' (1978). The works were originally published individually in ''

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 ...

''. All the stories are set in the fictional

New England New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York (state), New York to the west and by the Can ...

town of Shady Hill, where the suburbanite residents exist in an allegorical Hades: "a nice house with a garden and a place outside for cooking meat," and where "there was no turpitude; there had not been a divorce…there had not even been a breath of scandal."

Stories

The date of publication in ''

'' appears in parentheses.:
" O Youth and Beauty!" (August 22, 1953)
"The Sorrows of Gin" (December 12, 1953)
" The Five-Forty-Eight" (August 10, 1954)
"The Country Husband" (November 20, 1954)
"The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" (April 4, 1956)
"The Worm in the Apple"
"Just Tell Me Who It Was" (April 16, 1955)
"The Trouble of Marcie Flint" (November 9, 1957)

Reception

With this, the third of his short fiction collections, Cheever established himself as the chronicler "who mythologized modern American suburban life." Contemporary critical reaction to the volume noted Cheever's "growing significance" as a literary figure, but a number of reviewers detected "something a little vapid about the work." Citing biographer Scott Donaldson, Patrick Meanor points out "that some critics were not pleased with the idea of a writer making the suburbs the subject matter of his work. Many of these critics were New Yorkers, some of the working-class social strata of the Lower East Side who found little or no means of identifying with the problems of the relatively comfortable, college-educated business executives. The unapologetic socialist critics' worst enemies were those

WASP A wasp is any insect of the narrow-waisted suborder Apocrita of the order Hymenoptera which is neither a bee nor an ant; this excludes the broad-waisted sawflies (Symphyta), which look somewhat like wasps, but are in a separate suborder. ...

s whom Cheever wrote so passionately about. Even worse, he wrote about them with humor, compassion, and deep understanding, while simultaneously avoiding any obvious ethical or moral judgment on their life-style."

Critical assessment

Published during the period between Cheever's first two novels, ''

The Wapshot Chronicle ''The Wapshot Chronicle'' is the debut novel by American author John Cheever about an eccentric family that lives in a Massachusetts fishing village. Published in 1957, it won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1958,from the Awards 50-ye ...

'' (1957) and '' The Wapshot Scandal'' (1964), ''The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories'' may be termed "novelistic" in effect, as are

Sherwood Anderson Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and ...

's '' Winesburg, Ohio'' (1919) and

Ernest Hemingway Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century f ...

's '' In Our Time'' (1925). Biographer Lynne Waldeland considers ''The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories'' "a collection of uniformly high quality" and containing "some of the finest short stories of the twentieth century." adding this caveat: Literary critic

Eileen Battersby Eileen Battersby ( Whiston; 4 June 1956 – 23 December 2018) was the chief literary critic of ''The Irish Times''. She sometimes divided opinion, having been described by John Banville as "the finest fiction critic we have", while attractin ...

contends that the collection includes some "works of genius."Updike, 2009: "John Cheever, the author of five novels and of many—a hundred and twenty-one—of the most brilliant and memorable short stories ever printed…"

Footnotes

Sources

* Battersby, Eileen. 2010
"Great Writer Deserves Better"
''

The Irish Times ''The Irish Times'' is an Irish daily broadsheet newspaper and online digital publication. It launched on 29 March 1859. The editor is Ruadhán Mac Cormaic. It is published every day except Sundays. ''The Irish Times'' is considered a newspaper ...

'', January 2, 2010. Retrieved November 2, 2022 *Bailey, Blake. 2009 (1). Notes on the Text in ''John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writing.''

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 rang ...

. pp. 1025-1028 * Bailey, Blake. 2009 (2). ''Cheever: A Life''.

Alfred A. Knopf Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. () is an American publishing house that was founded by Alfred A. Knopf Sr. and Blanche Knopf in 1915. Blanche and Alfred traveled abroad regularly and were known for publishing European, Asian, and Latin American writers in ...

, New York. 770 pp. * Leonard, John. 1978. "Dreaming Against the Darkness: On The Stories of John Cheever". ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', November 7, 1978. Reprinted i
Book Marks Reviews
Retrieved November 3, 2022. *Meanor, Patrick. 1995. ''John Cheever Revisited.''

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 Gro ...

, New York. * Updike, John. 2009
"Basically Decent"
''

'', March 1, 2009. Retrieved November 2, 2022. *Waldeland, Lynne. 1979. ''John Cheever''.

, G. K. Hall & Company, Boston, Massachusetts. *Yardley, Jonathan. 2004
"John Cheever's 'Housebreaker,' Welcome as Ever"
''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...

'', July 20, 2004. Retrieved November 2, 2022. {{DEFAULTSORT:Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories, The 1958 short story collections American short story collections Short story collections by John Cheever Harper & Brothers books