What “Mad Men” Owes To John Cheever
The final week of May brought the confluence of John Cheever’s birthday and the final-season mid-season finale of “Mad Men,” whose creator Matthew Weiner has lately been speaking on the record about the writer’s influence on his show. Easy connections have been made from the beginning–1960s suburban setting; middle-aged malaise; alcoholism; adultery–the identifying of surface-level similarities tracking well with the general tendency to reduce Cheever’s work to nothing more than a critique of post-war, upper-middle-class mores. Pictured are Don Draper (left) and Cheever (right).
