William Maxwell

We often read in order to understand, but sometimes we read in order to cope. And nearly always, we need to understand in order to cope.

“Coping” is arguably one of the most used verbs these days, heard as frequently as wishes for good health and safety. The books we pick up in order to cope with the current crisis sometimes reflect a desire to escape, a desire that might be fulfilled by comedies, romances, and classic whodunits. Or sometimes we want to face an even deeper abyss, reflect on how much worse the situation could get (with, e.g., Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider), how much worse it once was (see Michael Buhler’s recent review of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year[i]), or how much worse it never will be (Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games, hopefully). Many media thus provide those seeking guidance with reading list, covering every possible genre. Thankfully, a nowadays less widely read author sometimes also makes it onto these lists: William Keepers Maxwell, Jr. (1908-2000).

This paper examines the composition and editing of John Cheever’s 1956 short story ‘The Housebreaker of Shady Hill’ by the author and his editors at The New Yorker, a popular general interest magazine, in early 1955. It argues that, in the case of ‘The Housebreaker of Shady Hill’, Cheever and his editors, Gustave Lobrano and William Maxwell, worked in tandem with each other, despite their different objectives and motivations, in order to transform a submission deemed unsuitable for the magazine into an archetypal suburban “New Yorker story” about Johnny Hake, an upper-middle-class suburbanite who steals money from his neighbours in a series of burglaries to avoid foreclosure after losing his job.