Falconer - (Vintage International) by John Cheever (Paperback)

About the Book

In a nightmarish prison a convict named Farragut--a professor, drug addict, and a fratricide--struggles to remain a man. "One of the most important novels of our time . . . Read it and be ennobled".--Los Angeles Times.

Book Synopsis

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Stunning and brutally powerful, "one of the most important novels of our time" (The New York Times) tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back into childhood.

In a nightmarish prison, out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction. Only Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make Falconer such a triumphant work of the moral imagination.

Review Quotes

"Cheever's triumph.... A great American novel." --Newsweek

"One of the most important novels of our time.... Read it and be ennobled." --The New York Times

"Falconer is splendid. It is rough, it is elegant, it is pure. It is also indispensable, if you earnestly desire to know what is happening to the human soul in the U.S.A." --Saul Bellow

"One of our truly fine writers.... The novel proceeds directly on its course, taking the reader along with it.... Moving and excellent." --The Washington Post

"John Cheever is an enchanted realist, and his voice ... is as rich and distinctive as any of the leading voices of postwar American literature." --Philip Roth

About the Author

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1978 The Stories of John Cheever won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly before his death in 1982, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.