He volunteered in 1971 to teach a course on the short story to inmates at Sing Sing. He befriended some of the inmates, especially a “pale, emaciated white man” and “serious loser” (son Fred’s term) named Donald Lang, whom Cheever continued to associate with after his release. It was Lang who, hostilely, wondered “where a little shit like you gets the balls to come in here”: even at the time of the prisoner riots at Attica, Cheever remained blithe, and later told an interviewer, “If the cons and I were lined up against a guard, I was all with the cons.”

New Yorker, 9.3.2009 > John Updike: Basically Decent, über eine neue John Cheever-Biografie

Siehe auch: NYT Magazine, 1.3.2009 > Charles McGrath: The First Suburbanite