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. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER “Richly inventive and vividly told.” — The New York Times Magazine “A literary mosaic.... A tapestry woven from the threads of emotion, tragedy, comedy.... Cheever is a pleasure to read.” —S an Francisco Chronicle “A brilliantly written novel.” — Time “Ringing with life.” — The Guardian 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. Chapter One St. Botolphs was an old place, an old river town. It had been an inland port in the great days of the Massachusetts sailing fleets and now it was left with a factory that manufactured table silver and a few other small industries. The natives did not consider that it had diminished much in size or importance, but the long roster of the Civil War dead, bolted to the cannon on the green, was a reminder of how populous the village had been in the 1860’s. St. Botolphs would never muster as many soldiers again. The green was shaded by a few great elms and loosely enclosed by a square of store fronts. The Cartwright Block, which made the western wall of the square, had along the front of its second story a row of lancet windows, as delicate and reproachful as the windows of a church. Behind these windows were the offices of the Eastern Star, Dr. Bulstrode the dentist, the telephone company and the insurance agent. The smells of these offices—the smell of dental preparations, floor oil, spittoons and coal gas—mingled in the downstairs hallway like an aroma of the past. In a drilling autumn rain, in a world of much change, the green at St. Botolphs conveyed an impression of unusual permanence. On Independence Day in the morning, when the parade had begun to form, the place looked prosperous and festive. The two Wapshot boys—Moses and Coverly—sat on a lawn on Water Street watching the floats arrive. The parade mixed spiritual and commercial themes freely and near the Spirit of ’76 was an old delivery wagon with a sign saying: get your fresh fish from mr. hiram. The wheels of the wagon, the wheels of every vehicle in the parade were decorated with red, white and blue crepe paper and there was bunting everywhere. The front of the Cartwright Block was festooned with bunting. It hung in folds over the front of the bank and floated from all the trucks and wagons. The Wapshot boys had been up since four; they were sleepy and sitting in the hot sun they seemed to have outlived the holiday. Moses had burned his hand on a salute. Coverly had lost his eyebrows in another explosion. They lived on a farm two miles below the village and had canoed upriver before dawn when the night air made the water of the river feel tepid as it rose around the canoe paddle and over their hands. They had forced a window of Christ Church as they always did and had rung the bell, waking a thousand songbirds, many villagers and every dog within the town limits including the Pluzinskis’ bloodhound miles away on Hill Street. “It’s only the Wapshot boys.” Moses had heard a voice from the dark window of the parsonage. “Git back to sleep.” Coverly was sixteen or seventeen then—fair like his brother but long necked and with a ministerial dip to his head and a bad habit of cracking his knuckles. He had an alert and a sentimental mind and worried about the health of Mr. Hiram’s cart horse and looked sadly at the inmates of the Sailor’s Home—fifteen or twenty very old men who sat on benches in a truck and looked unconscionably tired. Moses was in college and in the last year he had reached the summit of his physical maturity and had emerged with the gift of judicious and tranquil self-admiration. Now, at ten o’clock, the boys sat