Mary Cheever | Author and muse, 95
Mary Cheever, 95, an accomplished author and poet best known as the enduring spouse and widow of John Cheever, has died, surviving by decades a husband who used their lonely, but lasting, marriage as an inspiration for some of his most memorable stories.
Mary Cheever, 95, an accomplished author and poet best known as the enduring spouse and widow of John Cheever, has died, surviving by decades a husband who used their lonely, but lasting, marriage as an inspiration for some of his most memorable stories.
She had been battling pneumonia and died Monday night at her colonial-style manor in suburban Ossining, N.Y., her daughter, Susan Cheever, said.
The home served as a well-publicized backdrop to John Cheever's facade as the gentleman scribe of "The Swimmer" and "The Five-Forty-Eight."
Mrs. Cheever, a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, was a teacher, fiction editor of Westchester Magazine, author of The Changing Landscape: A History of Briarcliff Manor-Scarborough, and writer of The Need for Chocolate and Other Poems, which included the poem "Gorgon" and its note of "life-denying husbandry."
Born Mary Winternitz in New Haven, Conn., Mrs. Cheever came from an accomplished and imposing family. Her father, Milton Winternitz, was the dean of the Yale School of Medicine. Her mother, Helen Watson, also a doctor, was the daughter of Thomas Watson, to whom Alexander Graham Bell called out during the first telephone conversation. - AP