in an essay “drawn from The ’50s: The Story of a Decade, an anthology of New Yorker articles, stories, and poems” published the last week in October, Jonathan Franzen considers the writers and stories that came to characterize the magazine’s fiction.
“Along with John Updike and Ann Beattie, Cheever was the paradigmatic ‘New Yorker story’ writer, Franzen says, adding, “While Cheever and Updike were creating the main template for the New Yorker story, regional variants were flourishing.”