 | |
| Author | John Cheever |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Knopf |
Publication date | 1977 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
Falconer is a 1977 novel by American short story writer and novelist John Cheever. [2] [3] It tells the story of Ezekiel Farragut, a university professor and drug addict who is serving time in Falconer State Prison for the murder of his brother. Farragut struggles to retain his humanity in the prison environment, and begins an affair with a fellow prisoner.
Kirkus Reviews called Cheever's prose "an amazingly flexible instrument" and summarized the novel as "a strong fix—a statement of the human condition, a parable of salvation." [4] Reviewing the book in 1977 for The New York Times , Joan Didion wrote, "On its surface 'Falconer' seems at first to be a conventional novel of crime and punishment and redemption—a story about a man who kills his brother, goes to prison for it and escapes, changed for the better—and yet the 'crime' in this novel bears no more relation to the 'punishment' than the punishment bears to the redemption. The surface here glitters and deceives. Causes and effects run deeper." [5]
Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005. [6]
In 2009, Audible.com produced an audio version of Falconer, narrated by Jay Snyder, as part of its Modern Vanguard line of audiobooks.
In the episode "The Cheever Letters" of Seinfeld , it transpires that the father of Susan Ross had a passionate love affair with John Cheever, to the embarrassment of his wife and daughter. At the end of the episode, George is shown reading Falconer.
Erle Stanley Gardner was an American author and lawyer, best known for the Perry Mason series of legal detective stories. Gardner also wrote numerous other novels and shorter pieces as well as a series of nonfiction books, mostly narrations of his travels through Baja California and other regions in Mexico.
Gary Mark Gilmore was an American criminal who gained international attention for demanding the implementation of his death sentence for two murders he had admitted to committing in Utah. After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a new series of death penalty statutes in the 1976 decision Gregg v. Georgia, he became the first person in almost ten years to be executed in the United States. These new statutes avoided the problems under the 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia, which had resulted in earlier death penalty statutes being deemed "cruel and unusual" punishment, and therefore unconstitutional. Gilmore was executed by a firing squad in 1977. His life and execution were the subject of the 1979 nonfiction novel The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer, and 1982 TV film of the novel starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gilmore.
James Kirkwood Jr. was an American playwright, author and actor. In 1976 he received the Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the Broadway hit A Chorus Line.
Trinity is a novel by American author Leon Uris, published in 1976 by Doubleday. It spent 21 weeks atop The New York Times Best Sellers list in 1976 and 14 weeks in 1977.
Sing Sing Correctional Facility, formerly Ossining Correctional Facility, is a maximum-security prison operated by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in the village of Ossining, New York, United States. It is about 30 miles (48 km) north of Midtown Manhattan on the east bank of the Hudson River. It holds about 1,700 inmates and housed the execution chamber for the State of New York until the abolition of capital punishment in New York in 2007.
John William Cheever was an American short story writer and novelist. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born; and Italy, especially Rome. His short stories included "The Enormous Radio", "Goodbye, My Brother", "The Five-Forty-Eight", "The Country Husband", and "The Swimmer", and he also wrote five novels: The Wapshot Chronicle , The Wapshot Scandal, Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella, Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982).
Old Sparky is the nickname of the electric chairs in Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Old Smokey was the nickname of the electric chairs used in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. "Old Sparky" is sometimes used to refer to electric chairs in general, and not one of a specific state.
Jailbird is a novel by American author Kurt Vonnegut, published in 1979 by Delacorte Press. The novel is often described as Vonnegut's "Watergate novel," as it explores themes related to the Watergate scandal, the American labor movement, and the political landscape of the United States during the mid-20th century.
May Ruth Snyder was an American murderer. Her execution in the electric chair at New York's Sing Sing Prison in 1928 for the murder of her husband, Albert Snyder, was recorded in a highly publicized photograph.
Island in the Sun is a 1957 drama film produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and directed by Robert Rossen. It features an ensemble cast including James Mason, Harry Belafonte, Joan Fontaine, Joan Collins, Dorothy Dandridge, Michael Rennie, Stephen Boyd, Patricia Owens, John Justin, Diana Wynyard, John Williams, and Basil Sydney. The film is about race relations and interracial romance set in the fictitious island of Santa Marta. Barbados and Grenada were selected as the sites for the movie based on the 1955 novel by Alec Waugh. The film was controversial at the time of its release for its on-screen portrayal of interracial romance.
Kathryn Harrison is an American author. She has published seven novels, two memoirs, two collections of personal essays, a travelogue, two biographies, and a book of true crime. She reviews regularly for The New York Times Book Review. Her personal essays have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in Bookforum, Harper's Magazine, More Magazine, The New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Vogue, Salon, and Nerve.
Charles E. Chapin was an American editor of Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening World. He was convicted of the murder of his wife and sentenced to a 20-year-to-life term in Sing Sing prison.
Elmer Gantry is a 1960 American drama film about a confidence man and a female evangelist selling religion to small-town America. Adapted by director Richard Brooks, the film is based on the 1927 novel of the same name by Sinclair Lewis, and stars Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons, Arthur Kennedy, Shirley Jones and Patti Page.
The Franchise Affair is a 1948 British mystery novel by Josephine Tey about the investigation of a mother and daughter accused of kidnapping a young woman visiting their area. It was published in the UK by Peter Davies Ltd in 1948 and in the USA by The Macmillan Company in 1949. While the book has maintained its reputation among readers of British genre fiction, and has often been adapted to other media, its social attitudes have been heavily criticised by more modern commentators.
Kenneth J. Lamberton is an American writer and former teacher. Born in Duluth, Minnesota, Lamberton attended the University of Arizona, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in biology and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. He was working as a science teacher in Mesa, Arizona in 1985 when he was awarded a Teacher of the Year award. A few months later, the then 28-year-old Lamberton was arrested for child molestation for having an affair with a 14-year-old student and transporting her across state lines. During his twelve-year prison term at the Santa Rita unit of the Arizona State Prison Complex at Tucson, he participated in a creative writing program run by Richard Shelton and became a writer, penning essays for the prison magazine La Roca. After his release on September 25, 2000, he began to publish non-fiction books and articles on natural history and crime and punishment in the Southwest.
Oh What a Paradise It Seems is a 1982 novella by John Cheever. It is Cheever's last work of fiction, published shortly before his death from cancer.
Jane Stanton Hitchcock is an American author, playwright, and screenwriter. She has written several plays but is known mostly for her mystery novels Trick of the Eye, The Witches' Hammer, Social Crimes, One Dangerous Lady, Mortal Friends, and Bluff, which was the winner of the 2019 Hammett Prize. Hitchcock also wrote the screenplays for Our Time and First Love.
Black Bird is an American true crime drama miniseries developed by Dennis Lehane, based on the 2010 autobiographical novel In with the Devil: a Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption by James Keene with Hillel Levin. The six-episode miniseries premiered on July 8, 2022, on Apple TV+. The series received critical acclaim with particular praise toward Jimmy Keene's original story and its cast.
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"Goodbye, My Brother" is a short story by John Cheever, first published in The New Yorker, and collected in The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953). The work also appears in The Stories of John Cheever (1978).
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