John Cheever's "Hollywood Problem."

Cheever, John, 1912-1982; Short story (Literary form); Novelists; Authors; Farmhouses; Koerner, Henry; Monogamous relationships

This essay presents information on the problems faced by John Cheever, American short story writer and novelist in Hollywood. In 1960, producer Jerry Wald had hired Cheever to adapt D. H. Lawrence's novel "The Lost Girl" for Twentieth Century Fox, and Wald refused to let Cheever work at home in Scarborough-on-Hudson. The job would require almost a month in Hollywood away from his family. Cheever feared that such a long isolation in the alien, decadent world of Hollywood would fatally impair his better instincts, and in his journal he agonized over "the Hollywood problem." One "immense consolation" was the proximity of dear old friends, the writer John Weaver and his wife who lived in the Hollywood Hills.