Deeply affected by the changing social and moral climate of postwar America, Cheever became increasingly convinced that a decade founded in promise, convenience, and wonderment was depreciating in value to the point of concern. Attempting to explore this concern in his fiction while at the same time hoping to restore a semblance of order to a world in transition, Cheever turned his attention from the short story to the novel and re-created in The Wapshot Chronicle a picture of life in an old, New England fishing village during the first half of the twentieth century. While presenting a family history of the Wapshots, the novel allows Cheever to examine both the role of family and the relationship of the individual to contemporary society.

A keen observer of the realities underlying the surface appearance of existence, Cheever turned a disparaging eye on the "forceful absurdities of life...