He reflects upon the nature of his experience at the school, stressing his alienation and disaffection: the restrained analysis of the academic establishment is a covert but powerful indictment of the system.
The reason for his departure is not perfectly clear, as Cheever himself provided a number of unrelated versions including poor grades, smoking on campus, or homosexual encounters with some of his classmates.
"[15][16] In a 1978 interview with John Hersey in The New York Times Book Review, Cheever recalled: I was delighted to be expelled from Thayer.
"[17]Cheever, in an act of youthful audacity, submitted the work to Malcolm Cowley, editor of the prestigious leftist journal The New Republic.
Cowley was so impressed with the story that he waived the magazine's policy of carrying only non-fiction articles, and published "Expelled" in its October 1, 1930, issue.
He sat down and wrote a story about it, applying a thin veneer of fiction to his own experience...[24]Literary critic George W. Hunt notes the influence of Ernest Hemingway in the opening paragraph of the work:[25] It didn't come all at once.
":[27] "The nonlinear structure has sometimes been misread as a sign of literary apprenticeship rather than understood as characteristic of Cheever's approach, both early and late, to the writing of fiction.
"[28] Praising Cheever's "stylistic restraint" in "Expelled", literary critic Patrick Meanor reports that "the narrative voice is never strident."
They weren't prepared to educate anybody...[29] Literary critic James E. O'Hara quotes a passage from the story to illustrate Cheever's contempt and alienation from Thayer Academy and the prep school establishment: "Few American writers have begun their careers at the age of seventeen with a story like "Expelled", which combines the clumsiness of a first effort with a remarkable maturity of vision...establishing an autobiographical pattern of composition that Cheever adhered to throughout his life.
"— Literary critic Patrick Meanor in John Cheever Revisited (1995)[30][31] Donaldson adds: "In 999 cases out of a thousand, such a submission would have turned into a political harangue and been rejected without a second glance.