And so my class on “Who is Don Draper?” continues.
We recently discussed a few short stories by American writer John Cheever.
“The Swimmer,” “The Five-Forty-Eight” and “The Housebreaker on Shady Lane” are just three of the stories we talked about.
Cheever is dubbed a suburban realist. A prominent theme in his writing is: things are not what they seem. And, he turned self-loathing into works of art.
Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, says he keeps books by John Cheever in his office and turns to them for inspiration.
Here are just a few Cheeveresque elements in the show:
1. John Cheever and the Drapers live in Ossining, New York.
2. The Drapers’ address is Bullet Park Road; Cheever wrote a novel called Bullet Park.
3. Betty Drapers’ involvement in a civic dispute (the building of a proposed water tank in town) was inspired by the short story “An Educated American Woman.”
4. There’s a lot of drinking and smoking in Mad Men. This brings to mind one of Cheever’s most famous opening lines “It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, I drank too much last night.”