The main reading room in the library is named for John Cheever, the great American novelist and short story writer who lived in Ossining from 1951 until his death in 1982.
The library's Board of Trustees named the room, which was designed as the library's "living room," to honor Cheever's contributions to literature and his strong connections to Ossining, his adopted hometown. When Cheever was on the cover of Time in 1964, the headline was: "The Ovid of Ossining." John Leonard, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, has praised Cheever as "the Chekhov of the suburbs."
Cheever won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Medal for Literature. His short stories and novels, including The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal, Bullet Park, and Falconer (inspired by writing classes he taught at Sing Sing) remain mainstays of 20th century fiction.
Jane Clark, a longtime library staffer, remembers Cheever as a friend of the Ossining Public Library and how in 1982 Cheever wrote to Dorothy Lander, who was then the library director, noting that "with the destruction of the Hollow (a reference to the widening of Route 9), the Public Library, crowned on its hill, will seem to be the brains of the village and I suspect it has been all along."
In his 1988 biography, Scott Donaldson wrote that it was in Ossining "that Cheever showed himself most plain. He came to love the town toward the end, for both its physical beauty and its lack of pretentiousness."
Cheever was a regular at the Highland Diner "where he'd arrive with a book or newspaper and look around for someone to talk to…… … He knew and was liked by so many people in the town that his family used to call him the Mayor of Ossining. He never ran for office, of course, but there was an abortive movement in the wake of the Pulitzer to name a street after him. Cheever was pleased and self-deprecatory about this at the same time. He and Mary and the children sat around the dinner table thinking of what else might be named after him. 'Let's see,' he proposed, 'how about the John Cheever Memorial Dump?'"
When Cheever died, Donaldson reports, flags in Ossining flew at half-mast for ten days. His son, Ben, and daughter-in-law Janet, lowered the flag at the Highland Diner themselves. The Ossining Citizen Register proudly wrote that "Cheever was as closely associated with Ossining as Emerson with Concord or Tolstoy with Yasnaya Ployana."
Twenty-four years later, no garbage dump has been named after Cheever. But his photo is proudly displayed at the Highland Diner, noting that a great American writer used to eat here. And a lovely reading room has been named in his honor.
A dedication ceremony for the room with members of the Cheever family will be held after the new library opens. His widow, Mary Cheever, who lives in Ossining, is the author of The Changing Landscape: A History of Briarcliff-Manor — Scarborough. Two of their three children, Susan Cheever and Benjamin Cheever, are novelists and essayists. Benjamin also is the editor of The Letters of John Cheever and wrote the introduction to The Journals of John Cheever. (Cheever's journals at Harvard's Houghton Library run to five million words).
Cheever's writing and personal life remain of interest to readers, 24 years after his death. Blake Bailey, who's writing a biography of Cheever, scheduled to be published late next year, has said he intends to write Cheever's life as "a redemptive fable."
To hear a 1992 CBS Radio interview with Benjamin Cheever about his own career and his father go to: http://wiredforbooks.org/benjamincheever/
To hear Susan Cheever talking about her writing and her father in 1984, 1985 and 1991 interviews, go to: http://wiredforbooks.org/susancheever/