UPDIKE, John (Hoyer)

Nationality: American. Born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, 18 March 1932. Educated at public schools in Shillington; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, A.B. (summa cum laude) 1954; Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts, Oxford (Knox fellow), 1954-55.Married 1) Mary Pennington in 1953 (marriage dissolved), two daughters and two sons; 2) Martha Bernhard in 1977. Career: staff reporter, New Yorker, 1955-57. Recipient: Guggenheim fellowship, 1959; Rosenthal award, 1960; National Book award, 1964; O. Henry award, 1966; Foreign Book prize (France), 1966; New England Poetry Club Golden Rose, 1979, MacDowell medal, 1981; Pulitzer prize, 1982, 1991; American Book award, 1982; National Book Critics Circle award, for fiction, 1982, 1991, for criticism, 1982; Union League Club Abraham Lincoln award, 1982; National Arts Club Medal of Honor, 1984; PEN/Faulkner award, 1988; National Medal of the Arts, 1989; Pulitzer Prize, 1991; National Book Critics Circle award, 1991; Harvard Arts medal, 1998; National Book Foundation award, Lifetime Achievement, 1998. Member, American Academy, 1976. Address: Beverly Farms, Beverly, Massachusetts 01915, U.S.A.

Publications

Novels

The Poorhouse Fair. New York, Knopf, and London, Gollancz, 1959

Rabbit, Run. New York, Knopf, 1960; London, Deutsch, 1961

The Centaur. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1963.

Of the Farm. New York, Knopf, 1965.

Couples. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1968

Rabbit Redux. New York, Knopf, 1971; London, Deutsch, 1972.

A Month of Sundays. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1975.

Marry Me: A Romance. New York, Knopf, 1976; London, Deutsch, 1977.

The Coup. New York, Knopf, 1978; London, Deutsch, 1979.

Rabbit Is Rich. New York, Knopf, 1981; London, Deutsch, 1982.

The Witches of Eastwick. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1984.

Roger's Version. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1986.

S. New York, Knopf, and London Deutsch, 1988.

Rabbit at Rest. New York, Knopf, 1990; London, Deutsch, 1991.

Memories of the Ford Administration. New York, Knopf, 1992;London, Hamish Hamilton, 1993.

Brazil. New York, Knopf, and London, Hamish Hamilton, 1994.

Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy. New York, Knopf, 1995.

In the Beauty of the Lilies. New York, Knopf, 1996.

Toward the End of Time. New York, Knopf, 1997.

Bech at Bay: A Quasi-novel. New York, Knopf, 1998.

Gertrude and Claudius. New York, Knopf, 2000.

Short Stories

The Same Door. New York, Knopf, 1959; London, Deutsch, 1962.

Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1962.

Olinger Stories: A Selection. New York, Knopf, 1964.

The Music School. New York, Knopf, 1966; London, Deutsch, 1967.

Penguin Modern Stories 2, with others. London, Penguin, 1969.

Bech: A Book. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1970.

The Indian. Marvin, South Dakota, Blue Cloud Abbey, 1971.

Museums and Women and Other Stories. New York, Knopf, 1972;London, Deutsch, 1973.

Warm Wine: An Idyll. New York, Albondocani Press, 1973.

Couples: A Short Story. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Halty Ferguson, 1976.

Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories. New York, Knopf, 1979; London, Deutsch, 1980.

Three Illuminations in the Life of an American Author. New York, Targ, 1979.

The Chaste Planet. Worcester, Massachusetts, Metacom Press, 1980.

The Beloved. Nothridge, California, Lord John Press, 1982.

Bech Is Back. New York, Knopf, 1982; London, Deutsch, 1982.

Getting Older. Helsinki, Eurographica, 1985.

Going Abroad. Helsinki, Eurographica, 1987

Trust Me. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1987.

The Afterlife. Leamington, Warwickshire, Sixth Chamber Press, 1987.

Baby's First Step. Huntington Beach, California, Cahill, 1993.

The Afterlife and Other Stories. New York, Knopf, and London, Hamish Hamilton, 1994.

Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, "Rabbit Remembered." New York, Knopf, 2000.

Uncollected Short Stories

"Morocco," in Atlantic (Boston), November 1979.

Plays

Three Tests from Early Ipswich: A Pageant. Ipswich, Massachusetts, 17th Century Day Committee, 1968.

Buchanan Dying. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1974.

Verse

The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures. New York, Harper, 1958; as Hoping for a Hoopoe, London, Gollancz, 1959.

Telephone Poles and Other Poems. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1963.

Verse. New York, Fawcett, 1965.

Dogs Death. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Lowell House, 1965.

The Angels. Pensacola, Florida, King and Queen Press, 1968.

Bath after Sailing. Monroe, Connecticut, Pendulum Press, 1968.

Midpoint and Other Poems. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1969.

Seventy Poems. London, Penguin, 1972.

Six Poems. New York, Aloe, 1973.

Query. New York, Albondocani Press, 1974.

Cunts (Upon Receiving the Swingers Life Club Memberships Solicitation ). New York, Hallman, 1974.

Tossing and Turning. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1977.

Sixteen Sonnets. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Halty Ferguson, 1979.

An Oddly Lovely Day Alone. Richmond, Virginia, Waves Press, 1979.

Five Poems. Cleveland Bits Press, 1980.

Spring Trio. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Palaemon Press, 1982.

Jester's Dozen. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1984.

Facing Nature. New York, Knopf, 1985; London, Deutsch, 1986.

A Pear Like a Potato. Northridge, California, Santa Susana Press, 1986.

Two Sonnets. Austin, Texas, Wind River Press, 1987.

Collected Poems, 1953-1993. New York, Knopf, and London, HamishHamilton, 1993.

Other

The Magic Flute (for children), with Warren Chappell. New York, Knopf, 1962.

The Ring (for children), with Warren Chappell. New York, Knopf, 1964.

Assorted Prose. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1965.

A Child's Calendar. New York, Knopf, 1965.

On Meeting Authors. Newburyport, Massachusetts, Wickford Press, 1968.

Bottom's Dream: Adapted from William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Nights Dream" (for children). New York, Knopf, 1969.

A Good Place. New York, Aloe, 1973. Picked-Up Pieces. New York, Knopf, 1975; London, Deutsch, 1976.

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1977.

Talk from the Fifties. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1979.

Ego and Art in Walt Whitman. New York, Targ, 1980.

People One Knows: Interviews with Insufficiently Famous Americans. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1980.

Invasion of the Book Envelopes. Concord, New Hampshire, Ewert, 1981.

Hawthorne's Creed. New York, Targ, 1981.

Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York, Knopf, 1983;London, Deutsch, 1984.

Confessions of a Wild Bore (essay). Newton, Iowa, TamazunchalePress, 1984.

Emersonianism (lecture). Cleveland, Bits Press, 1984.

The Art of Adding and the Art of Taking Away: Selections from John Updike's Manuscripts, edited by Elizabeth A. Falsey. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard College Library, 1987.

Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1989.

Just Looking: Essays on Art. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1989.

Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1991.

Concerts at Castle Hill. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1993.

The Twelve Terrors of Christmas. New York, Gotham Book Mart, 1993.

Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf, drawings by Paul Szep. New York, Knopf, 1996.

A & P, edited by Wendy Perkins. Fort Worth, Texas, Harcourt BraceCollege Publishers, 1998.

More Matter: Essays and Criticism. New York, Knopf, 1999.

Editor, Pens and Needles, by David Levine. Boston, Gambit, 1970.

Editor, with Shannon Ravenel, The Best American Short Stories 1984. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1984; as The Year's Best American Short Stories, London, Severn House, 1985.

Editor, A Century of Arts and Letters: The History of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters as Told, Decade by Decade, by Eleven Members. New York, Columbia University Press, 1998.

Bibliography:

John Updike: A Bibliography by C. Clarke Taylor, Kent, Ohio, Kent State University Press, 1968; An Annotated Bibliography of John Updike Criticism 1967-1973, and a Checklist of HisWorks by Michael A. Olivas, New York, Garland, 1975; John Updike: A Comprehensive Bibliography with Selected Annotations by Elizabeth A. Gearhart, Norwood, Pennsylvania, Norwood Editions, 1978; John Updike: A Bibliography, 1967-1993, compiled by Jack De Bellis, foreword by John Updike, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1994.

Manuscript Collection:

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Critical Studies:

interviews in Life (New York), 4 November 1966, Paris Review, Winter 1968, and New York Times Book Review, 10 April 1977; John Updike by Charles T. Samuels, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1969; The Elements of John Updike by Alice and Kenneth Hamilton, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Eerdmans, 1970; Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral Elements in John Updike's Fiction by Larry E. Taylor, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1971; John Updike: Yea Sayings by Rachael C. Burchard, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1971; John Updike by Robert Detweiler, New York, Twayne, 1972, revised edition, 1984; Rainstorms and Fire: Ritual in the Novels of John Updike by Edward P. Vargo, Port Washington, New York, Kennikat Press, 1973; Fighters and Lovers: Theme in the Novels of John Updike by Joyce B. Markle, New York, New York University Press, 1973; John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays by Suzanne H. Uphaus, New York, Ungar, 1980; The Other John Updike: Poems/Short Stories/Prose/Play, 1981, and John Updike's Novels, 1984, both by Donald J. Greiner, Athens, Ohio University Press; John Updike's Images of America by Philip H. Vaughan, Reseda, California, Mojave, 1981; Married Men and Magic Tricks: John Updike's Erotic Heroes by Elizabeth Tallent, Berkeley, California, Creative Arts, 1982; Critical Essays on John Updike edited by William R. Macnaughton, Boston, Hall, 1982; John Updike by Judie Newman, London, Macmillan, 1988; Conversations with John Updike edited by James Plath, Jackson, Mississippi, University Press, 1994; John Updike Revisited by James A. Schiff, New York, Twayne Publishers, 1998; John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and The Motions of Grace, edited by James Yerkes, Grand Rapids, Michigan, W.B. Eerdmans, 1999; The John Updike Encyclopedia by Jack De Bellis, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 2000; John Updike, edited by Harold Bloom, Philadelphia, Chelsea House Publishers, 2000.

John Updike comments:

In over thirty years as a professional writer I have tried to give my experience of life imaginative embodiment in novels, short stories, and poems. Art is, as I understand it, reality passed through a human mind, and this secondary creation remains for me unfailingly interesting and challenging.

For over forty years, Updike has been regularly producing his novels about small town and suburban middle class Americans—in short, ordinary people—and their messy domestic lives. He writes with relish, caring, and precision of their marriages and remarriages, sexual trysts, and their struggles to make sense of themselves. Births, deaths, infidelities, and failures fill his pages. Violence, blessedly, is rarely present. Most often, the books chart the way his protagonists adjust their dreams to more nearly match reality. What mark, he wonders, do such people's lives finally make? He is adept at describing the day-to-day existence of suburban bridge players who cultivate their roses, trim their hedges, feed their faces, tidy their homes, maintain contact with children and grandchildren and "socioeconomically identical acquaintances," and travel to Florida and to Maine in suitable seasons, to paraphrase Updike. He also captures specific time periods in our history: the 1950s, the cold war, the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, and Truman's America. Allegorically, the Nixon term in the White House lies behind The Coup, a novel set in Africa. Buchanan's aborted presidency and the Ford administration have also been treated. He adopts various voices, writing from a woman's perspective as well as a man's; using present tense to tell some tales; writing at once from the perspective of a Protestant, ex-basketball star, Harry Angstrom, living in rural Pennsylvania, while at other times employing the persona of his alter-ego, Henry Bech, unmarried, childless, and Jewish, suffering from writer's block and settled in Manhattan.

In his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, he took an old people's home as his subject and experimented with the form of the anti-novel. At the time, readers were startled that such a young man would write so knowingly about the old people, his grandfather's generation. In a sense, his career has come full circle. In 1997 he published Toward the End of Time, where he assumes the voice of Ben Turnbull, a sixty-six year old, twice married, retired investment counselor, living in Massachusetts in the year 2020. America has been reduced to a commonwealth, complete with new currency, brought about by a Sino-American Conflict that dissolved the government, collapsed the national economy, decimated the population, and resulted in social chaos. Only the criminal elements have the resources left to rule. Ben's journal recounts the happenings of a difficult year when he is preoccupied by sex and aging, only to find he has prostate cancer. He suffers the indignities and pain of surgery and the consequent incontinence and impotence that follow. He revisits his past, his life with his first wife, Perdita, and with his second wife, the ravishing, strong-willed, dynamic, Gloria, who is determined to have him kill the deer that are ruining her roses, yew bushes, and the euonymus hedge over by the driveway. There are blank spots in his thinking and his journal captures his daily life, often leaving the reader uncertain whether the facts he recounts are true or imagined. In typical Updike form, the novelist fleshes out Ben's mind, recounting his fascination with recent scientific theories about parallel universes that have branched from this moment of measurement. Often he seems to enter one or another of these other "many worlds." Ben also ruminates on Neanderthal man, the Biblical past, St. Paul and his crisis theology, his own personal ancestry, and looks forward into future time.

True also to form, Updike offers an unblinking account of the processes of aging and Ben's numerous infirmities, capturing his fears and joys, the toll age exacts and the hopes it awakens. Ben insists that his wife is worried about whether she or he will die first, priming him with vitamins by day while by night, dreaming of his death. Later he marvels at her loyalty and bravery in the face of his illness, at the same time he refuses to minimize his discomforts—his "rumbling, spurting bowels" and his diapers—or her level-headed, self-centered and self-protective ways. His olfactory sense is heightened—all stinks and messes are minutely described. He fears for the sanity of his mind and wonders how much he has forgotten. In one of his fantasies that seems to be real, he purchases the favors of a young prostitute, relishing the numerous ways he can take her, the cunnilingus and fellatio they can practice, his desire to slap her too decisively in the midst of sex, the pleasure he takes in talking crudely to her, addressing her as his "bitch," "whore," and "working-class doxy," but bringing her into his house as his so-called "wife" during a period of time when he claims that his wife has disappeared and he seems uncertain whether he has shot her in his attempt to get rid of the deer, or whether she is simply misplaced or has left him.

This novel and his latest book, Gertrude and Claudius, compare with other "last works" of such great writers as Shakespeare or Yeats in that the vision shifts, mellows, while the writer employs new forms and an altered style to reflect the wisdom and insights that come with age. Shakespeare completed his life with three "last plays," Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. In each, he abandons the form of the tragedy, replacing it with romance. In The Winter's Tale the central action of an entire tragedy is compressed into the opening act. Later, sixteen years passes, a child grows up, a statue comes to life, and Leontes, the jealous king of the first act regains a wife. In later poetry of Yeats, the poet continues his celebration of the world of artifice and Byzantium, but acknowledges in "The Circus Animals' Desertion" that all inspiration starts in "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart." Updike also relies more on romance and myth in his latest novels while at the same time reveling in the powers of the body and sex and probing philosophical questions about the nature of life, time, and religion. Even as the physical body visibly decays, the protagonist's hunger is not only undiminished, it is heightened, and the spirit of experimentation and a craving for plenty is abundant. Many of the passages explicitly describing sex recall the excesses of sexuality expressed in "The Wild Old Wicked Man" and other late poems by Yeats. The bizarre grotesqueries that also figure in Toward the End of Time have an oddness akin to the monstrous scene in Cymbeline where Imogen cradles the headless body of Cloten in her arms, mistaking him for her beloved Posthumous. The manner in which Updike condenses material that earlier had engrossed him, and lingers on descriptive passages of a bucolic texture while taking extreme liberties with time also make the comparison apt.

Updike has often drawn on myth and fairy tales in his novels and reworked the stories of others. The St. Stephen story figures prominently in The Poorhouse Fair and reappears in Toward the End of Time. The Centaur uses the Chiron version of the Hercules myth, alternately telling the tale of George Caldwell, a teacher and the Chiron figure, and the Centaur. The subject of Rabbit, Run, the first novel in his tetralogy, is based on Beatrix Potter's Tale of Peter Rabbit. In The Witches of Eastwick, Updike looks at the lives of three modern day divorcées, seeing the similarities between their predicament and those of witches and their covens. Darryl Van Horne is the devil in this work. Therefore, it is not unexpected to find him theorizing in Toward the End of Time that several worlds and different time periods may exist simultaneously and offering glimpses into these alternate worlds or earlier times.

His habit of rewriting stories from the perspectives of different characters is also one of his trademarks. He has written a trilogy of novels based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's, The Scarlet Letter. In Updike's case, A Month of Sundays tells the story of the adulterous minister, Marshfield, from his point of view and offers a parody of the triangle in Hawthorne's tale; in Roger's Version we are given the betrayed husband's perspective and Updike explores the theme of the unknowability of God; S. completes the trilogy providing the view of the adulterous woman, Hawthorne's Hester Prynne.

His decision to write a novel about the lives of Gertrude, Claudius, Hamlet Senior, and Hamlet immediately prior to where the action opens in Shakespeare's play is almost expected. I should hasten to mention that the central figures appear under different names in different parts of the book, a topic that bears further comment later.

Updike has long marveled at the talents of James Joyce, understanding his need to write his own variant of Shakespeare's story and the Hamlet material in his masterwork, Ulysses. Joyce uses Stephen to spin his erudite explanation of Shakespeare's relationship to his creations, both the real children he bore in life and those he invented in his writings. He is familiar with Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, also based on the Hamlet legend. Updike, ever the researcher and inventive in the interests of his art, fashions his novel in three parts and presents Gertrude's story. In Part I of his book, he turns to a late-twelfth-century Latin account of the ancient Hamlet legend in Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus that was first printed in Paris in 1514. In Part II, he uses alternate spellings of the central figures' names, drawing on another version of the Saxo tale, François de Belleforest's, Histoires tragiques, that appeared prior to Shakespeare's Hamlet and was republished in English in 1608, probably as a result of the popularity of Shakespeare's play. In Part III, he concludes his novel, drawing on the so-called Ur-Hamlet, generally attributed to Thomas Kyd that was acquired by Shakespeare's company and served as the source of his play. Updike achieves a marvelous sense of ancient history and times, largely by dint of employing the ancient spellings of the names of the central characters and by imitating the style of an old Danish legend in his writing. For example, Gerutha is Gertrude in Part I, Horwendil is Hamlet Senior, Feng is Claudius, and Corambis is Polonius, coming originally from a German variant of the ancient tale. Hamlet first emerges as Amleth. He recounts the tale whereby Rorik (Gertrude's father) pledges Gerutha to Horwendil, co-governor of Jutland, who has slain the tormentor of Denmark's coast, the feared King Koll of Norway, giving him the funeral he required while butchering the slain man's sister, as his brother, Feng (read Claudius) is fighting on behalf of the Holy Roman Emperor and whoring in far away lands. Updike takes sheer delight in writing this ancient saga with a thoroughly contemporary twist, and his stylistic touches show him at his best.

The book also seems to be a vehicle to answer some of his feminist critics who have faulted Updike for the way he treats women. He has been accused of constantly treating women as broads, air-heads, often amoral. Some feminists loathed The Witches of Eastwick, resenting Updike's treatment of the three female women, their philosophies of life, their forays into lesbianism, their fascination with and seduction by Horne. In Gertrude and Claudius Hamlet is depicted as a cold, unloving son and Gertrude's affair with Claudius is traced to her ambivalence towards Hamlet Senior, a man whom she was obliged to marry by her father after he had conquered the King Koll.

Updike's style in this book is beguiling: he adopts the tone of an earlier age, proffering the story from Gertrude's perspective and capturing her domesticity, her boredom, her yearning to be truly needed by her husband and lord, not simply taken by him through his authority and used to produce heirs. His treatment of Gertrude's sense of guilt once she has taken her husband's brother to her bed and her desire to remain ignorant of Claudius's ultimate crime while harboring the truth just below her levels of consciousness is convincing. His grasp of Polonius, Hamlet, and Ophelia also seems fresh. Given how much has been written about this play of Shakespeare's, it is hard to imagine that a writer could offer another plausible reading, appropriate to the late twentieth century. Updike has managed to do this in a manner that will delight the reader.

One of the virtues of Updike's talent is that so many of his books are memorable. The tetralogy of books that take Harry Angstrom as their protagonist, namely Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, assured Updike his place as one of America's best contemporary writers. He aspires to a quality of writing he finds in Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Henry Green, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth and it is fair to say that he has achieved that goal. The freshness of his characters, the truth of his vision, and his ability to describe exactly events, places, people, and feelings are all evident in this very American collection. In Couples, his wildly popular novel of wife-swapping among suburbanites, he ensured that his audience would remember him as one of the very finest describers of sex, belonging alongside Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Henry Miller, and Jack Kerouac, writers whom he invokes when he discusses how sex is depicted in this pornographic age of ours. Of course, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce are the writers that first convinced him that sex must assume a central place in any writing that purports to capture life. His books on Bech, too, show us a writer in his prime, and they have the virtue of permitting him to write in the character and mind of someone like himself, although very dissimilar in certain ways, rather than constraining him to have to imagine the consciousness of a less well-educated, less privileged Middle-American. Finally, his recent writing, although continuing in veins he opened earlier, continues to surprise and please their reader.

—Carol Simpson Stern

UPDIKE, John (Hoyer)

Nationality: American. Born: Shillington, Pennsylvania, 18 March 1932. Education: Public schools in Shillington; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, A.B. (summa cum laude) 1954; Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts, Oxford (Knox Fellow), 1954–55. Family: Married 1) Mary Pennington in 1953 (dissolved), two daughters and two sons; 2) Martha Bernhard in 1977. Career: Staff reporter, New Yorker, 1955–57; writer since 1957. Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1959; Rosenthal award, 1960; National Book award, 1964; O. Henry award, 1966; Foreign Book prize (France), 1966; New England Poetry Club Golden Rose, 1979; MacDowell Medal, 1981; Pulitzer prize, 1982, 1991; American Book award, 1982; National Book Critics Circle award, for fiction, 1982, 1991, for criticism, 1984; Union League Club Abraham Lincoln award, 1982; National Arts Club Medal of Honor, 1984; National Medal of the Arts, 1989; Howells medal, 1995; Campion award, 1997; Hemingway Literary Light award, 1999. Member: American Academy, 1976. Address: Beverly Farms, Beverly, Massachusetts 01915, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures. New York, Harper, 1958; as Hoping for a Hoopoe, London, Gollancz, 1959.

Telephone Poles and Other Poems. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1963.

Verse. New York, Fawcett, 1965.

Dog's Death. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Lowell House, 1965.

The Angels. Pensacola, Florida, King and Queen Press, 1968.

Bath after Sailing. Monroe, Connecticut, Pendulum Press, 1968.

Midpoint and Other Poems. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1969.

Seventy Poems. London, Penguin, 1972.

Six Poems. New York, Aloe, 1973.

Query. New York, Albondocani Press, 1974.

Cunts (Upon Receiving the Swingers Life Club Membership Solicitation). New York, Hallman, 1974.

Tossing and Turning. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1977.

Sixteen Sonnets. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Halty Ferguson, 1979.

An Oddly Lovely Day Alone. Richmond, Virginia, Waves Press, 1979.

Five Poems. Cleveland, Bits Press, 1980.

Spring Trio. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Palaemon Press, 1982.

Jester's Dozen. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1984.

Facing Nature. New York, Knopf, 1985; London, Deutsch, 1986.

A Pear like a Potato. Northridge, California, Santa Susana Press, 1986.

Two Sonnets. Austin, Texas, Wind River Press, 1987.

The Afterlife. Leamington, Warwickshire, Sixth Chamber Press, 1987.

On the Move. Cleveland, Bits Press, 1988.

Getting the Words Out. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1988.

Mites & Other Poems in Miniature. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1990.

Recent Poems, 1986–1990. Helsinki, Eurographica, 1990.

Collected Poems 1953–1993. London, Penguin, 1993.

In the Cemetery High above Shillington. Concord, New Hampshire, William Ewert, 1995.

Plays

Three Texts from Early Ipswich: A Pageant. Ipswich, Massachusetts, 17th Century Day Committee, 1968.

Buchanan Dying. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1974.

Novels

The Poorhouse Fair. New York, Knopf, and London, Gollancz, 1959.

Rabbit, Run. New York, Knopf, 1960; London, Deutsch, 1961.

The Centaur. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1963.

Of the Farm. New York, Knopf, 1965.

Couples. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1968.

Rabbit Redux. New York, Knopf, 1971; London, Deutsch, 1972.

A Month of Sundays. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1975.

Marry Me: A Romance. New York, Knopf, 1976; London, Deutsch, 1977, and reprinted, Hamish Hamilton, 1993.

The Coup. New York, Knopf, 1978; London, Deutsch, 1979.

Rabbit Is Rich. New York, Knopf, 1981; London, Deutsch, 1982.

The Witches of Eastwick. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1984.

Roger's Version. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1986.

S, A Novel. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1988.

Rabbit at Rest. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1990.

A Rabbit Omnibus: Three Angstrom Novels. London, Deutsch, 1990.

Memories of the Ford Adminstration. New York, Knopf, and London, Penguin, 1992.

Brazil. London, Penguin, 1994.

In the Beauty of the Lilies. New York, Knopf, 1996.

Toward the End of Time. New York, Knopf, 1997.

Gertrude and Claudius. New York, Knopf, 2000.

Short Stories

The Same Door. New York, Knopf, 1959; London, Deutsch, 1962.

Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1962.

Olinger Stories: A Selection. New York, Knopf, 1964.

The Music School. New York, Knopf, 1966, and reprinted as The Music School: Short Stories, 1991; London, Deutsch, 1967.

Penguin Modern Stories 2, with others. London, Penguin, 1969.

Bech: A Book. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1970.

The Indian. Marvin, South Dakota, Blue Cloud Abbey, 1971.

Museums and Women and Other Stories. New York, Knopf, 1972;London, Deutsch, 1973.

Warm Wine: An Idyll. New York, Albondocani Press, 1973.

Couples: A Short Story. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Halty Ferguson, 1976.

Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories. New York, Fawcett, 1979; as Your Lover Just Called: Stories of Joan and Richard Maple, London, Penguin, 1980.

Problems and Other Stories. New York, Knopf, 1979; London, Deutsch, 1980.

Three Illuminations in the Life of an American Author. New York, Targ, 1979.

The Chaste Planet. Worcester, Massachusetts, Metacom Press, 1980.

The Beloved. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1982.

Bech Is Back. New York, Knopf, 1982; London, Deutsch, 1983.

Getting Older. Helsinki, Eurographica, 1985.

Going Abroad. Helsinki, Eurographica, 1987.

Trust Me. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1987.

More Stately Mansions. Jackson, Mississippi, Nouveau Press, 1987.

The Afterlife and Other Stories. Lodon, Hamish Hamilton, 1995.

Bech at Bay. New York, Knopf, and London, Hamish Hamilton, 1998.

Other

The Magic Flute (for children), with Warren Chappell. New York, Knopf, 1962.

The Ring (for children), with Warren Chappell. New York, Knopf, 1964.

Assorted Prose. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1965.

A Child's Calendar. New York, Knopf, 1965.

On Meeting Authors. Newburyport, Massachusetts, Wickford Press, 1968.

Bottom's Dream: Adapted from William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (for children). New York, Knopf, 1969.

A Good Place. New York, Aloe, 1973.

Picked-Up Pieces. New York, Knopf, 1975; London, Deutsch, 1976.

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1977.

Ego and Art in Walt Whitman. New York, Targ, 1978.

Talk from the Fifties. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1979.

People One Knows: Interviews with Insufficiently Famous Americans. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1980.

Hawthorne's Creed. New York, Targ, 1981.

Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York, Knopf, 1983;London, Deutsch, 1984; reprinted, Hopewell, New Jersey, Ecco Press, 1994.

Confessions of a Wild Bore (essay). Newton, Iowa, Tamazunchale Press, 1984.

Emersonianism (lecture). Cleveland, Bits Press, 1984.

The Art of Adding and the Art of Taking Away: Selections from John Updike's Manuscripts, edited by Elizabeth A. Falsey. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard College Library, 1987.

Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1989.

Just Looking: Essays on Art. New York, Knopf, and London, Deutsch, 1989.

Brother Grasshopper. Worcester, Massachusetts, Metacom Press, 1990.

The Alligators. Mankato, Minnesota, Creative Education, 1990.

Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism. New York, Knopf, 1991; London, Penguin, 1992.

The Complete Henry Bech. London and New York, Penguin, 1992.

Concerts at Castle Hill: John Updike's Middle Initial Reviews Local Music in Ipswich, Massachusetts, from 1961 to 1965. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1993.

Conversations with John Updike. Jackson, University of Mississippi Press, 1994.

A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (for children). New York, Knopf, 1994.

Golf Dreams. New York, Knopf, 1996.

More Matter. New York, Knopf, 1999.

Editor, Pens and Needles, by David Levine. Boston, Gambit, 1970.

Editor, with Shannon Ravenel, The Best American Short Stories 1984. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, 1984; as The Year's Best American Short Stories, London, Severn House, 1985.

Editor, A Century of Arts and Letters. New York, Columbia University Press, 1998.

Editor, with Katrina Kenison, Best American Short Stories of the Century, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

Bibliography: John Updike: A Bibliography by C. Clarke Taylor, Kent, Ohio, Kent State University Press, 1968; An Annotated Bibliography of John Updike Criticism 1967–1973, and a Checklist of His Works by Michael A. Olivas, New York, Garland, 1975; John Updike: A Comprehensive Bibliography with Selected Annotations by Elizabeth A. Gearhart, Norwood, Pennsylvania, Norwood Editions, 1978; John Updike: A Bibliography of Research and Criticism, 1970–1986 by Cameron Northouse, Dallas, Contemporary Research Associates, 1988; John Updike: A Bibliography, 1967–1993 by Jack De Bellis, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1994.

Manuscript Collection: Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Critical Studies: Interviews in Life (New York), 4 November 1966, Paris Review, winter 1968, and New York Times Book Review, 10 April 1977; John Updike by Charles T. Samuels, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1969; John Updike by Robert Detweiler, New York, Twayne, 1972, revised edition, 1984; John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by David Thorburn and Howard Eiland, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1979; John Updike by Suzanne H. Uphaus, New York, Ungar, 1980; The Other John Updike: Poems/Short Stories/Prose/Play by Donald J. Greiner, Athens, Ohio University Press, 1981; Critical Essays on John Updike edited by William R. Macnaughton, Boston, Hall, 1982; Updike's Novels: Thorns Spell A Word by Jeff H. Campbell, Wichita Falls, Texas, Midwestern State University Press, 1987; John Updike edited by Harold Bloom, New York, Chelsea House, 1987; John Updike by Judie Newman, London, Macmillan, 1988; The Survivor in Contemporary American Fiction: Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. by Sukhbir Singh, Delhi, B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1991; Something and Nothingness: The Fiction of John Updike & John Fowles by John Neary, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1992; Updike's Version: Rewriting The Scarlet Letter by James A. Schiff, Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1992; John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction by Robert M. Luscher, New York, Twayne, 1993; New Essays on Rabbit, Run by Stanley Trachtenberg, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993; in Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit Novels, Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 1998; John Updikeand Religion edited by James Yerkes, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Eerdsman, 1999.

John Updike comments:

(1970) I began as a writer of light verse and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the strictness and liveliness of the lesser form. My extensive prose writing has consumed much of the energy that might have gone into my development as a poet, though my long poem "Midpoint" is an attempt to catch up.

(1985) In my most recent collection, Facing Nature, I am proudest of the sonnets and the seven linked "odes" to natural processes.

(1990) I am looking forward to assembling my Collected Poems for publication in 1993.

(1999) I am looking forward to collecting my recent poems for publication in 2001.

It is perhaps inevitable that, as one of the most distinguished of America's post-World War II novelists, John Updike the poet should have been undervalued, at least outside the United States. Despite his belief in and practice of (from time to time) light verse and his virtuosic abilities (including parodic skills) in it, the finest of his serious poems stand in relationship to his light verse something like the way the composer Shostakovich's symphonies, impressive public utterances, do to the confessional intimacy of his string quartets.

Updike's first volume, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, shows a characteristic delight in the handling of language, deftness in manipulating regular forms, and pleasure in mocking the more absurd pronouncements of such constant pundits of the passing moment as journalists and advertising men. In "Duet with Muffled Brakes," for instance, he satirizes the claim made in the New Yorker (for which Updike once worked and where many of his early poems, stories, and prose pieces first appeared) that the meeting of Mr. Rolls with Mr. Royce made engineering history. There are serious poems, too, like "Ex-Basketball Player," which touch on one of the central themes of Updike's poetry, the quick passage of youthful prowess and the inevitability of the aging process.

Updike's next collection, Telephone Poles, again contains some dazzlingly brilliant light verse parodying "occasional poems" (in the narrow sense of the term). They include the hilarious "Recital," based on an actual headline in the New York Times, "Roger Baobo Gives Recital on Tuba," in which Updike indulges in wildly improbable, witty rhyming. Other poems in the lighter section celebrate Agatha Christie and Beatrix Potter for their "perfect craft" and Dr. Johnson for his role as a great revivifier of language.

In the more important serious section Updike deals with themes familiar to readers of his novels: the pleasures of the ordinary, the sense of ever impending mutability that hangs over all things, and, in the title poem, the importance of humans' resourcefulness in adapting nature to their needs. In "Seven Stanzas at Easter" he deals with those who seek to mystify Christianity, dismissing the facile use of mythic symbolism in the Resurrection story with "make no mistake: if He rose at all /it was as His body."

The long title poem of Midpoint is autobiographical, taking the reader through a self-examination of the poet's life to the age of thirty-seven, when he is preparing to face the reverse slope of the "Hill of Life," as he calls it. Grimy photographs of the poet at various stages of his career, drawings, and humorous mathematical formulae are used to enliven the central sections. The poem concludes in mock eighteenth-century style:

The time is gone, when Pope could ladle Wit
In couplet droplets, and decanter it.
Wordsworth's sweet brooding, Milton's pride.
And Tennyson's unease have all been tried;
Fin-de-siècle sickliness became
High-stepping Modernism, then went lame.
Art offers now, not cunning and exile,
But blank explosions and a hostile simile.
  Deepest in the thicket, thorns spell a word.
Born laughing, I've believed in the Absurd,
Which brought me this far; henceforth, if I can,
I must impersonate a serious man.

In the second part of Midpoint Updike is serious in a collection of moving lyrical poems. In "Topsfield Fair," for instance, looking at turkeys, rabbits, cattle, pigeons, and the "mute meek monkey," he observes that

Our hearts go out to them, then stop:
our fellows in mortality, like us
stiff-thrust into marvellous machines
tight-packed with chemical commands
to breathe, blink, feed, sniff, mate,
and, stuck like stamps in species, go out of date.

Tossing and Turning contains poems recalling Updike's boyhood in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and his days at Harvard, "vast village where the wise enjoy the young." A prevailing tone is expressed by the lady in "South of the Alps," in which, driving along, the poet says that her "… hand fell heavy on my arm and grasped, /'Tell me—why doesn't anything last?'" There are also two poems, "Cunt" and "Pussy," that explicitly celebrate sexual love with a startlingly explicit, imaginative intensity.

If little fresh ground is broken in Updike's collection Facing Nature, the celebration of the ordinary in American life is no less skilled and the technique no less spikily varied. And the melancholy tone, if anything, is more pervasive, as in "The Moons of Jupiter":

So, in a city, as we hurry along
Or swiftly ascend to the sixtieth floor,
Enormity suddenly dawns and we become
Beamwalker treading a handsbreadth of steel,
The winds of space shining around our feet.

The poetry is restlessly lively in imagery, energetic in rhythmic variety, and constantly echoing the hollow at the heart of things. Although Updike never lets us forget the "cityscape /whose mass would crush us were we once /to stop the inward chant, This not real," he frequently, and deliciously, relieves his, and our, angst with such refreshing nonsense as

The cars in Caracas
create a ruckukus,
a four-wheeled fracacas,
taxaxis and trackus.
 
Cacaphono-comic,

the tracaffic is farcic;
its weaves leads the stomach
to turn Caracarsick.

—Maurice Lindsay

UPDIKE, John (Hoyer)

Nationality: American. Born: Shillington, Pennsylvania, 18 March 1932. Education: Public schools in Shillington; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, A.B. (summa cum laude) 1954; Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts, Oxford (Knox fellow), 1954-55. Family: Married 1) Mary Pennington in 1953 (marriage dissolved), two daughters and two sons; 2) Martha Ruggles in 1977. Career: Staff reporter, The New Yorker, 1955-57. Lives in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1959; Rosenthal award, 1960; National Book award, 1964; O. Henry award, 1966; Foreign Book prize (France), 1966; New England Poetry Club Golden Rose, 1979; MacDowell medal, 1981; Pulitzer prize, 1982, 1991; American Book award, 1982; National Book Critics Circle award, for fiction, 1982, for criticism, 1984; Union League Club Abraham Lincoln award, 1982; National Arts Club Medal of Honor, 1984; National Medal of the Arts, 1989; National Book Critics Circle award, 1990; Howells Medal, 1995; The Campion award, 1997. Member: American Academy, 1964.

Publications

Short Stories

The Same Door. 1959.

Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories. 1962.

Olinger Stories: A Selection. 1964.

The Music School. 1966.

Penguin Modern Stories 2, with others. 1969.

Bech: A Book. 1970.

The Indian. 1971.

Museums and Women and Other Stories. 1972.

Warm Wine: An Idyll. 1973.

Couples: A Short Story. 1976.

Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories. 1979; as Your Lover Just Called: Stories of Joan and Richard Maple, 1980.

Problems and Other Stories. 1979.

Three Illuminations in the Life of an American Author. 1979.

The Chaste Planet. 1980.

The Beloved. 1982.

Bech Is Back. 1982.

Getting Older. 1985.

Going Abroad. 1987.

Trust Me. 1987.

The Afterlife. 1987.

Brother Grasshopper. 1990.

Novels

The Poorhouse Fair. 1959.

Rabbit, Run. 1960.

The Centaur. 1963.

Of the Farm. 1965.

Couples. 1968.

Rabbit Redux. 1971.

A Month of Sundays. 1975.

Marry Me: A Romance. 1976.

The Coup. 1978.

Rabbit Is Rich. 1981.

The Witches of Eastwick. 1984.

Roger's Version. 1986.

S. 1988.

Rabbit at Rest. 1990.

Memories of the Ford Administration. 1992.

Brazil. 1994.

In the Beauty of the Lilies. 1996.

Toward the End of Time. 1997.

Plays

Three Texts from Early Ipswich: A Pageant. 1968.

Buchanan Dying. 1974.

Poetry

The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures. 1958; as Hoping for a Hoopoe, 1959.

Telephone Poles and Other Poems. 1963.

Verse. 1965.

Dog's Death. 1965.

The Angels. 1968.

Bath after Sailing. 1968.

Midpoint and Other Poems. 1969.

Seventy Poems. 1972.

Six Poems. 1973.

Query. 1974.

Cunts (Upon Receiving the Swingers Life Club Memberships Solicitation). 1974.

Tossing and Turning. 1977.

Sixteen Sonnets. 1979.

An Oddly Lovely Day Alone. 1979.

Five Poems. 1980.

Spring Trio. 1982.

Jester's Dozen. 1984.

Facing Nature. 1985.

A Pear Like a Potato. 1986.

Two Sonnets. 1987.

Recent Poems, 1986-1990. 1990.

Collected Poems, 1953-1993. 1993.

Other

The Magic Flute (for children), with Warren Chappell. 1962.

The Ring (for children), with Warren Chappell. 1964.

Assorted Prose (includes stories). 1965.

A Child's Calendar (for children). 1965.

On Meeting Authors. 1968.

Bottom's Dream: Adapted from William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (for children). 1969.

A Good Place. 1973.

Picked-Up Pieces (includes story). 1975.

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu. 1977.

Talk from the Fifties. 1979.

Ego and Art in Walt Whitman. 1980.

People One Knows: Interviews with Insufficiently Famous Americans. 1980.

Invasion of the Book Envelopes. 1981.

Hawthorne's Creed. 1981.

Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (includes stories). 1983.

Confessions of a Wild Bore (essay). 1984.

Emersonianism (lecture). 1984.

The Art of Adding and the Art of Taking Away: Selections from Updike's Manuscripts, edited by Elizabeth A. Falsey. 1987.

Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. 1989.

Just Looking: Essays on Art. 1989.

Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism (includes stories). 1991.

Conversations with John Updike, edited by James Plath. 1994.

A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects. 1995.

Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf. 1996.

Editor, Pens and Needles, by David Levine. 1970.

Editor, with Shannon Ravenel, The Best American Short Stories 1984. 1984; The Year's Best American Short Stories, 1985.

Bibliography:

Updike: A Bibliography by C. Clarke Taylor, 1968; An Annotated Bibliography of Updike Criticism 1967-1973, and Checklist of His Works by Michael A. Olivas, 1975; Updike: A Comprehensive Bibliography with Selected Annotations by Elizabeth A. Gearhart, 1978; John Updike: A Bibliography, 1967-1993 by Jack De Bellis, 1994.

Critical Studies:

interviews in Life 4, November 1966, Paris Review, Winter 1968, and New York Times Book Review, 10 April 1977; Updike by Charles T. Samuels, 1969; The Elements of Updike by Alice and Kenneth Hamilton, 1970; Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral Elements in Updike's Fiction by Larry E. Taylor, 1971; Updike: Yea Sayings by Rachael C. Burchard, 1971; Updike by Robert Detweiler, 1972, revised edition, 1984; Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by David Thorburn and Howard Eiland, 1979; Updike by Suzanne H. Uphaus, 1980; The Other Updike: Poems/Short Stories/Prose/Play by Donald J. Greiner, 1981; Updike's Images of America by Philip H. Vaughan, 1981; Married Men and Magic Tricks: Updike's Erotic Heroes by Elizabeth Tallent, 1982; Critical Essays on Updike edited by William R. Macnaughton, 1982; Updike by Judie Newman, 1988; John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction by Robert M. Luscher, 1993; New Essays on Rabbit Run edited by Stanley Trachtenberg, 1993.

John Updike published his first story, "Friends from Philadelphia," in The New Yorker in 1954 and joined the staff of the magazine a year later. Over the next three decades and more, he would in many ways serve as the quintessential New Yorker fiction writer in the mold of his colleagues J. D. Salinger and John Cheever: urbane, witty, sensitive, comfortably white middle-class, more interested in psychological nuances than plot.

Updike's first collection, The Same Door, distinguished by a lapidary style and an acute eye for significant detail, also revealed a yearning for an essentially Christian perspective and ethic. The latter is reflected in his quest for moments of grace, Joycean epiphanies, among the many polite wars, often marital, being waged by his conflicted protagonists. For instance, in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth," perhaps the collection's strongest story, there is a climactic lurch of insight, typically ambivalent, shared by a high school teacher and the pretty adolescent girl who had tricked him into believing that she had a crush on him. "Ace in the Hole," foreshadowing a major theme of and a preliminary sketch for Rabbit, Run, offers a modest case study of a representative American male's inability to mature.

From a historical vantage point the most significant story in The Same Door might be "Snowing in Greenwich Village," which introduces Joan and Richard Maple in a simple but subtly persuasive domestic drama involving the first serious threat to their young marriage. The Maples also figure in several later collections, the evolution and dissolution of their adultery-battered marriage crudely paralleling the course of Updike's own first marriage. Their stories were eventually collected in Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories, which became a television movie as well. The effectiveness of the Maples tales, more direct in narrative thrust than usual for Updike, has much to do with the author's painful empathy for both sides of the marital Punch-and-Judy show, though sympathy patently alights easier on Richard's consciousness.

Updike's second collection, Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, established his mastery of the form. The title story and "A&P" are among his most anthologized, and "Should Wizard Hit Mommy?" is almost as strong. If marriage is Updike's central focus, both as arena and as possible stoa for his moral scan of our culture's pressure points, then childhood, especially coming-ofage moments, runs a close second. For example, "Pigeon Feathers," set in Olinger, the eastern Pennsylvanian village modeled on Updike's hometown and the scene for a number of serial stories—the bulk of them collected in Olinger Stories, A Selection—and for The Centaur, reaches a climax with its anguished, dislocated 14-year-old protagonist finding divinity in the beautifully intricate design of the plumage of the pigeons his grandmother had ordered him to kill. For Sammy, the 19-year-old narrator of "A&P," which weaves a comic spell that deftly enhances its harsh denouement, the moment of truth is less sublime, his romantic moral gesture of quitting his job revealing only "how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter."

The Music School abandons childhood, adolescence, and passages of maturation for dives into the murky undercurrents of failing marriages. Except for two Maple stories, "Giving Blood" and "Twin Beds in Rome," the familiar stress on delicate probings of psychological sore spots deteriorates into a willful muffling of plot explosions at the expense of literary impact. Relaxed, observant, and always in control, Updike seems more concerned with stylistic conceits than with satisfying larger fictional expectations. Many of the stories are mere sketches, autobiographically etched meditations on the high price paid for lost ideals and an absent godhead.

The narrator of the title story, a writer, envisions his friends and himself as "all pilgrims, faltering toward divorce," but juxtapositions of a senseless murder with his domestic discomfit never coheres into an affecting social portrait. In fact, the expected moment of grace—being ravished by the appearance of his daughter when he comes to pick her up at the school he has transformed into a symbolic sanctuary—betrays a stunted psychosexual growth pattern almost Victorian in its sentimental pedophilia. Mary Allen and other critics have traced the limitations of Updike's vision of women, though they not always been fully cognizant of the distance between artifice and artisan.

Through the next two decades Updike continued to supply his quota of expertly tailored short fiction. But the heart of his prolific creative energy was being poured into his novels, particularly the Rabbit quartet, in which his relentless, at times pornographic, obsession with sex as transcendent hope and replacement for lost spiritual imperatives could have freer expression, as could his worrying the religious question in a broader cultural and aesthetic framework. Very few of the stories in Museums and Women, Problems and Other Stories, or Trust Me, can match the harsh brilliance of the portrait of contemporary America rendered by Rabbit at Rest. For example, "Trust Me," fluent and cleverly structured upon the thrust required for any love relationship to thrive, is far too pat in its plot design to achieve much emotional weight, however psychologically acute. And the story "Museums and Women" actually reinforces a Manichaean reduction of female realities to caricature.

With the publication in 1994 of The Afterlife and Other Stories, Updike seemed to signal a terminal berthing of his long fictional voyage. Unlike his later novels, many of the stories achieved an elegiac intensity equal to his earliest successes. For instance, the title story, which was placed first to point toward a set of variations on the theme of midlife crises and fated endings, tracks an aging couple's confrontation with the deaths and disturbing lifestyle changes of close friends. Its mild climax, which intimates the double meaning of "afterlife" to its retired protagonist, revolves around his awkward observation at the breakfast table to his wife and friends, "More and more, you see your contemporaries in the Globe obituaries. The Big Guy is getting our range."

But "A Sandstone Farmhouse," which arcs back to Of the Farm 's powerful mother and passive father figures for nostalgic energy, centers the collection, at least emotionally. Joey, who was 13 when his parents bought the house in 1946 and who resented being forced to sacrifice his city pleasures to his mother's Edenic dream—"She loved the old house; she loved the idea of it"—has returned 40 years later to dispose of it after her death. Not unexpectedly, the process impels him to reexperience the relationship that eased him into failure, an inability to love, despite his wife and children, who are now separated from him and his solitary Manhattan life.

Another potent tale, "The Journey to the Dead," also has a main character dwelling alone after 30 years of marriage, but his conflict with the other is with a female friend, once "a collegiate artsy type," who is now dying painfully but gallantly from a vicious cancer. At the end, quoting from the underworld episode in Homer's Odyssey, he fails her as well, fleeing her last agony. Updike, however, true to theme and its need for both closure and a last-ditch defense against total negation, settles into the traditional and real joys of "Grandparenting," in the story of that name. But his hard art refuses an easy escape from the Hades of impending oblivion as the narrator embraces a grandchild and realizes that "nobody belongs to us, except in memory." The integrity and haunting artistic implications of this insight illustrate why The Afterlife and Other Stories seems all of a piece in its resonate impact.

Updike's most durable stories, mainly from the early collections and the Maples chronicles, provide a series of vivid literary X rays of the once dominant American self—male, white, northeastern middle class—at a crisis stage of its deconstruction when the Puritan inheritance and consequent social and political assumptions could no longer neutralize urgent existential anxieties. They also depict, with frequently touching poetic exactitude, the sufferings attendant upon growing up in a family environment in which parental love is skewed by manipulative power conflicts, limning, in addition, the flawed marriages that must result when the off-spring of such unions wed.

—Edward Butscher

See the essays on "A&P" and "Lifeguard."

John Updike

Author John Updike (born 1932) mirrored his America in poems, short stories, essays, and novels, especially the four-volume "Rabbit" series.

John Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. His father, Wesley, was a high school mathematics teacher, the model for several sympathetic father figures in Updike's early works. Because Updike's mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, nurtured literary aspirations of her own, books were a large part of the boy's early life. This fertile environment prepared the way for a prolific career which began in earnest at the age of 22, upon the publication of his first story, "Friends from Philadelphia, " in the New Yorker in 1954.

Updike admired the New Yorker and aspired to become a cartoonist for that periodical. He majored in English at Harvard where he developed his skills as a graphic artist and cartoonist for the Lampoon, the college's humor magazine. In 1953, his junior year at Harvard, he married Mary Pennington, a Radcliffe art student. Upon graduation the following year, Updike and his bride went to London where he had won a Knox fellowship for study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford.

He returned to the United States in 1955 and took a job as a staff writer at the New Yorker at the invitation of famed editor E. B. White, achieving a life-long goal. But after two years and many "Talk of the Town" columns, he left New York for Ipswich, Massachusetts, to devote himself full time to his own writing.

Twenty Years of Poetry

Updike began his remarkable career as a poet in 1958 by publishing his first volume, a collection of poems titled The Carpentered Hen. It is a book of light, amusing verse in the style of Ogden Nash and Robert Service. The poetry possesses several stylistic conventions shared by his fiction: careful attention to the sounds of words and the nuances of their meanings, the use of popular culture by identifying objects by familiar brand names, and the mimicry of the popular press through advertising language and newspaper editorial boosterism. For example, a trivial snippet from Life magazine becomes the basis of a poem called "Youth's Progress, " which ostensibly details the physical metamorphosis of a young boy into an adult. "Dick Schneider of Wisconsin … was elected 'Greek God' for an interfraternity ball, " states the original excerpt from Life. The poem takes its cue from this by citing the common milestones of developing youth: "My teeth were firmly braced and much improved./ Two years went by; my tonsils were removed." The poet then playfully contrasts the narcissistic concerns of youth with the uniquely American optimistic faith in democracy, culminating in the assertion that even Greek divinity is accessible to the common man: "At twenty-one, I was elected Zeus."

Updike's output of light verse diminished with the publication of each succeeding volume of poems, and he stated later that he "writes no light verse now." His poetry has been collected in several volumes, among them Telephone Poles and Other Poems (1963); Midpoint (1969), which is an introspective assessment of the midpoint of his life; and Tossing and Turning (1977), which some critics consider his finest collection of verse. Much of the verse has been collected in a chronological format in a one-volume edition called Collected Poems: 1953-1993 (1993). Updike's poetry continued to appear in publications such as Poetry and the New Yorker.

The "Rabbit" Series and Other Novels

John Updike's first novel, published in 1959, was called Poorhouse Fair. It is a dystopian portrayal of an imaginary place under cruel conditions in the tradition of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, depicting life in a welfare state projected twenty years into the future, the late 1970s. The conflict between Conner, the young prefect of the home with an obsession for order, and Hook, a 94-year-old inmate who rebels against regimentation, is unresolved by the end of the novel, causing certain critics considerable discomfort with its ambiguity, especially Norman Podhoretz and other Commentary reviewers.

Although Updike's reputation rests on his complete body of works, he was first established as a major American writer upon the publication of his novel Rabbit Run (1960), although at that date no one could have predicted the rich series of novels that would follow it. It chronicled the life of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, creating as memorable an American character as Hester Prynne, Jay Gatsby, and Bigger Thomas. Harry Angstrom's life peaked in high school where he was admired as a superb basketball player. By the age of 26 he is washed up in a dead-end job, demonstrating gadgets in a dime store, living a disappointed and constricted life: "I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate." His primal reaction to this problem is to run (as would his namesake). And like Christian in the beginning of Pilgrim's Progress, he runs, fleeing his wife and family as though the salvation of his soul depends upon it. The climax of Rabbit's search results in tragedy, but it is to the credit of Updike's skill that great sympathy for a not-very-likable character is extracted from readers.

The second novel in the series, Rabbit Redux (1971), takes up the story of Harry Angstrom ten years later at the age of 36. Updike continues Rabbit's story against a background of current events. The novel begins on the day of the moon shot. It is the late 1960s and the optimism of American technology is countered by the despair of race riots, anti-Vietnam protests, and the drug culture. Rabbit is nostalgic for the secure serenity of the Eisenhower years. But his world is unsettled by realization that the old way of life is rapidly disappearing, his mother is dying of disease, and his father is aged. Rabbit has become complacent in the face of change. His wife, Janice, from whom he fled in Rabbit Run, now flees him and his inertia. His family is falling apart, mirroring divisive problems of the country at large. Rabbit finally overcomes his complacency and brings "outsiders" into his home, attempting to reconstitute his family. Although some critics were disappointed, Charles Thomas Samuels and Eugene Lyons among them, most, like Brendan Gill and Richard Locke, considered Rabbit Redux a successful novel.

The next book in the series was Rabbit Is Rich (1981), which won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. Rabbit is 46 and finally successful, selling Japanese fuel-efficient cars during the time of the oil crisis in the 1970s. In this novel Rabbit's son Nelson's failure becomes the counterweight to Rabbit's success. Updike describes an upper-middle-class milieu of Caribbean vacations and wife-swapping. Nelson revives Rabbit's vice of irresponsibility but without the grace Rabbit possessed in his youth. Rabbit again becomes the source of family salvation. He steps in for the missing Nelson to be present at the birth of his grandchild. In a sense, the loss of momentum represented by the fuel shortage and the consequent slowing of industry, and even the aging Harry Angstrom, is tentatively renewed by this young life. Updike offers slender hope in a bleak American landscape.

Rabbit at Rest (1990) brings Rabbit into the 1980s to confront an even grimmer set of problems: AIDS, cocaine addiction, and terrorism. Rabbit suffers a heart attack and is haunted by ghosts of his past. Death looms ever larger. The fragility of life and the randomness of death are represented for Harry by the Lockerbie tragedy where death becomes as inevitable as "falling from the burst-open airplane: he too is falling, helplessly falling, toward death." In these four novels an insignificant life presses and insists itself upon our consciousness, and we realize that this life has become the epic of our common American experience recorded over three decades.

Updike wrote many other major novels, including The Centaur (1963), Couples (1965), A Month of Sundays (1975), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), and Brazil (1993). Updike was also the author of several volumes of short stories, among them Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Music School (1966), Bech: A Book (1970), Museums and Women (1972), and Bech Is Back (1982). His novel In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) was met with mixed reviews from such esteemed literary critics as Gore Vidal. In addition to being a prolific novelist, Updike also released several volumes of essays, two being Odd Jobs (1991) and Just Looking: Essays on Art (1989). In 1996, he released a collection, Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (1996), which was met with favorable reviews. David Owen wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "Like plenty of other golfers, I suspect, I wish that John Updike had spent fewer man-years dutifully weighing the merits of unappealing foreign novels and more reflecting on his slice."

Updike has been honored throughout his career: twice he received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He also received the American Book Award and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Updike has been one of the most prolific American authors of his time, leading even his most ardent fans to confess, as Sean French did in New Statesman and Society, "…Updike can write faster than I can read…"

Further Reading

For Updike's discussion of himself and his work, his own Picked-up Pieces (1975) is useful because it contains interviews of Updike by others. Michael A. Olivas has compiled a useful bibliography called An Annotated Bibliography of John Updike Criticism, 1967-1973. For an early dissenting opinion on Updike see Norman Podhoretz's Doings and Undoings (1964). For good, concise, non-ideological discussions of Updike and his novels, see Robert Detweiler's Twain Edition of John Updike (1984). See also Donald Greiner's John Updike's Novels (1984). For a wide selection of reviews and essays, see William Macnaughton's Critical Essays on John Updike (1982). □

John Updike

Born: March 18, 1932
Shillington, Pennsylvania
American author and poet

Author John Updike mirrored his America in poems, short stories, essays, and novels, especially the four-volume "Rabbit" series.

Early life

John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. His father, Wesley, was a high school mathematics teacher, the model for several sympathetic father figures in Updike's early works. Because Updike's mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, had literary dreams of her own, books were a large part of the boy's early life. A sickly child, Updike turned to reading and art as an escape. In high school, he worked on the school newspaper and excelled in academics and upon graduation was admitted into Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

At the age of twenty-two, Updike began his writing career when he published his first story "Friends from Philadelphia," in the New Yorker in 1954. Since childhood Updike had admired the New Yorker and always dreamed of becoming a cartoonist for the magazine. He majored in English at Harvard where he developed his skills as a graphic artist and cartoonist for the Lampoon, the college's humor magazine. In 1953, his junior year at Harvard, he married Mary Pennington, a Radcliffe art student. Upon graduation the following year, Updike and his bride went to London, England, where he had won a Knox fellowship (scholarship) for study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England.

Updike returned to the United States in 1955 and took a job as a staff writer at the New Yorker at the invitation of famed editor E. B. White (1899–1985), achieving a lifelong goal. But after two years and many "Talk of the Town" columns, he left New York City for Ipswich, Massachusetts, to devote himself full time to his own writing.

Twenty years of poetry

Updike began his remarkable career as a poet in 1958 by publishing his first volume, a collection of poems titled The Carpentered Hen. It is a book of light, amusing verse in the style of Ogden Nash (1902–1971) and Robert Service (1874–1958). The poetry possesses several styles shared by his fiction: careful attention to the sounds of words and of their meanings, the use of popular culture by identifying objects by familiar brand names, and the imitation of the popular press through advertising language.

Updike's output of light verse diminished with the publication of each succeeding volume of poems. His poetry has been collected in several volumes, among them Telephone Poles and Other Poems (1963); Midpoint (1969), which is a personal look at the midpoint of his life; and Tossing and Turning (1977), which some critics consider his finest collection of verse.

The "Rabbit" series and other novels

Although Updike's reputation rests on his complete body of work, he was first established as a major American writer upon the publication of his novel Rabbit Run (1960)—although at that date no one could have predicted the rich series of novels that would follow. It chronicled the life of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, creating as memorable an American character as any that appeared in the twentieth century. Harry Angstrom's life peaked in high school where he was admired as a superb basketball player. But by the age of twenty-six he is washed up in a dead-end job, demonstrating gadgets in a dime store, living a disappointed and constricted life. His natural reaction to this problem is to "run" (as would his namesake). And he runs, fleeing his wife and family as though the salvation of his soul depends upon it. The climax of Rabbit's search results in tragedy, but it is to the credit of Updike's skill that great sympathy for a dislikable character is brought forth from readers.

The second novel in the series, Rabbit Redux (1971), takes up the story of Harry Angstrom ten years later at the age of thirty-six. Updike continues Rabbit's story against a background of current events. The novel begins on the day of the moon shot, when the first human walked on the moon. It is the late 1960s and the optimism of American technology is countered by the sour feelings towards race riots, antiwar protests, and the drug culture. His family is falling apart, mirroring the problems of the country at large. Rabbit finally overcomes his dismal situation and brings "outsiders" into his home, attempting to recreate his family.

The next book in the series is Rabbit Is Rich (1981), which won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. Rabbit is forty-six and finally successful, selling Japanese fuel-efficient cars during the time of the oil crisis in the 1970s. In this novel Rabbit's son Nelson's failure becomes the counterweight to Rabbit's success.

Rabbit at Rest (1990) brings Rabbit into the 1980s to confront an even grimmer set of problems: acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS; an incurable disease that attacks the immune system), cocaine addiction, and terrorism. Rabbit suffers a heart attack and is haunted by ghosts of his past. Death looms ever larger. In these four novels an insignificant life presses and insists itself upon our consciousness, and we realize that this life has become the story of our common American experience recorded over three decades.

Other works

Updike wrote many other major novels, including The Centaur (1963), Couples (1965), A Month of Sundays (1975), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), Brazil (1993), and Bech at Bay (1998). Updike was also the author of several volumes of short stories, among them Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Music School (1966), Bech: A Book (1970), Museums and Women (1972), and Bech Is Back (1982).

In 1999 Updike published More Matter: Essays and Criticism, a collection of occasional pieces, reviews, speeches, and some personal reflection. On February 27, 2000, his novel Gertrude and Claudius was published by Knopf. The book was based on William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) play Hamlet.

Updike has been honored throughout his career: twice he received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He also received the American Book Award and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Updike has been one of the most productive American authors of his time, leading even his most dedicated fans to confess, as Sean French did in New Statesman and Society, "Updike can write faster than I can read."

For More Information

Bloom, Harold, ed. John Updike. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 1987.

De Bellis, Jack. The John Updike Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998.

Updike, John. Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1989.