The Wapshot Chronicle

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Pulitzer Prize winner John Cheever’s classic novel about one eccentric New England family, inspired by the author's own adolescence. The Wapshots have called the quintessential Massachusetts fishing village of St. Botolphs home for eons, but now it is time for the next generation—brothers Moses and Coverly—to go out and see the world.

Moses heads to New York City and, eventually, a remote island in the South Pacific, while his brother travels south to Washington, D.C., and a job “so secret that it can’t be discussed here.” Meanwhile, back in St. Botolphs, their father, Captain Leander, clashes with his fearsome Cousin Honora, who controls the family purse strings.

By turns tragic and deeply funny, The Wapshot Chronicle is a “richly inventive and vividly told” (The New York Times Magazine) work of fiction about one very odd family.

John Cheever was born in 1912. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. He won the National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle and the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Stories of John Cheever. He also received the Howells Medal for Fiction and the National Medal for Literature. He died in 1982.