Ipswich columnist asks if Updike would be published today

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Bob Waite, whose father was Updike’s dentist back when the author lived and worked in Ipswich, has been a columnist for North Shore media for decades. Recently he wrote an opinion piece that was published by The Local News, “Lite Waite: Could John Updike, a Straight White Male, Find a Home in Today’s Literary Scene?”

It’s a fair question, but readers probably already know the answer. In fact, John Updike Society board member Sylvie Mathé was watching the new BBC miniseries Down Cemetery Road when she saw this allusion to Updike that perfectly captures the current situation (and provided these screenshots):

After Updike published his scandalous wife-swapping novel Couples in 1968, the attention the book brought elevated him to the role of spokesperson for America’s changing morality that deviated sharply from the staid 1950s. It’s no surprise then, that Updike would also become a lightning rod for criticism of male novelists during the era of “#Me Too.”

“There is no shortage of millennial white males who believe themselves shut out of a contemporary literary scene that seems curated by, and targeted at, women,” Waite wrote. “By implication, Updike would suffer a similar fate. To elaborate, Waite cites Ross Barkan (“From Misogyny to No Man’s Land”): “If men still sit at the top of publishing houses, it’s college-educated women writing, editing, and agenting most of the novels of note.” Barkan argues that straight white males have all but disappeared as authors and literary characters. Waite wrote, “He tells us that ‘between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations).'” Continue reading →

Editor Schiff and Updike siblings interviewed about the Selected Letters

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In his introduction to an interview he conducted with James Schiff, Joe Donahue wrote, “John Updike remains one of the most admired and prolific voices in American Literature. Over five decades he produced novels, short stories, poems, criticism, and essays that examine faith and art, desire, and the American experience in all its complexity. . . . Now in the new book ‘Selected Letters of John Updike’ editor James Schiff offers readers a window into that private world drawing from decades of correspondence. Schiff presents a portrait of Updike as both craftsman and confidante, generous, witty, and endlessly reflective about writing and life.”

Here’s the link to the WAMC Northeast Public Radio podcast.

More conversation about John Updike and the letters comes from a Radio Open Source interview with Michael Updike and Miranda Updike conducted by Christopher Lydon, a Boston-area fixture who interviewed John Updike on numerous occasions. In sending the link to the Updike siblings, Lydon wrote, “We want you to take a bow… and enjoy this piece as we do! You and Michael are heroic here, and funny and deep… And we all fall in love with your marvelous dad, all over again.”

Here’s the link to “John Updike’s Vocation.”

If you haven’t gotten a copy of the book yet, here’s a link to order from Bookshop.org, where every purchase supports local independent bookstores.

JUS Facebook Redux: Roth-Updike conference photos posted

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John Updike Society members may recall that Facebook’s not terribly intelligent Meta AI shut down The John Updike Society and The John Updike Childhood Home pages for alleged  “impersonation.” Other single author societies, Roth included, were also shut down. The Updike Society lost more than 10 years of posts and photos as a result. To share photos from last week’s Roth-Updike Conference in Greenwich Village, NYC, James Plath decided to slip a fastball under the chin and open another Updike Society account. Call it a Pop-up.

Here’s the link to the new Updike Society Facebook page for you to bookmark:  https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61582524401777

And here’s the link to the conference photo album (which you can find in the future by selecting the photos tab, then albums tab):  https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61582524401777&sk=photos_albums

Below is the planning committee, posing at the very last scheduled event . . . when there was nothing more to plan: (L to r) JUS veep James Schiff, JUS prez James Plath, co-director Adam Sexton, RS past prez Matthew Shipe, co-director Aimee Pozorski, and RS prez Andy Connolly.

Volume of Updike’s selected letters draws praise

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James Schiff’s long-awaited Selected Letters of John Updike will be released on Oct. 21, 2025, with a reading-booksigning-publication party scheduled that evening at the Salmagundi Club in New York City, where Schiff is in town to convene with other members of The John Updike Society for a joint Roth-Updike Conference with the Philip Roth Society.

The volume of Updike’s selected letters, decades in the making and years in the gathering, runs a whopping 912 pages and is published by Alfred A. Knopf, Updike’s publisher.

Early reviews were positive . . . and insightful, while later reviews continue to positive to glowing.

Kirkus Reviews
“Missives from the mountain. Updike . . . wrote to everyone, from famous writers and politicians to librarians and family members. ‘I can’t believe that you’re cutting ‘Spider-Man,’ he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe in 1994; after the letter, the Globe reinstated the comic strip. . . . In 1960, he wrote to publisher Alfred A. Knopf that his novels sought to present an image of an averagely physical young American.’ He resisted censorship, feeling that to cave to it would be ‘to funk my job.’ At times, though, he can be dead-on in his judgments: ‘I feel in general that literary history is too much modelled on biology when it is really more like geology. There is not much evolution; there is a great deal of accidental thrusts and upheavals and whatnot and when it’s all over a map is drawn.”
Read the entire review 

WSJ – The Wall Street Journal, reviewed by Thomas Mallon
“In ‘Selected Letters of John Updike,’ a new and predictably enormous collection of Updike’s correspondence, we see all his lovers, spouses, neighbors and children as persons, and we experience Updike himself with even more candor than he displayed in his first-person essays. . . . The letters illuminate the consistency of Updike’s fiction aesthetic. Remarkably, at 19, he wrote of the need for ‘an author who can see America as clearly as Sinclair Lewis, but, unlike Lewis, is willing to take it to his bosom.’ He would maintain, decade after decade, that style ‘is nothing less than the writer’s habits of mind—it is not a kind of paint applied afterwards, but the very germ of the thing.”
Read the entire review (subscription required)

The New York Times, reviewed by Dwight Garner
“Schiff estimates Updike typed some 25,000 letters and postcards over the course of his life. . . . Some 700 of them have been resurfaced by the indefatigable Schiff, who teaches at the University of Cincinnati and is the founding editor of The John Updike Review. Despite Updike’s distance-creating geniality, what an enormous and beneficent bounty these letters are for anyone who cares about this country’s literature during the last half century.”
Read the entire review (subscription required)

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Fall 2025 John Updike Review is published

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Editor James Schiff and managing editor Nicola Mason have done it again, assembling another fine issue of The John Updike Review. Volume 11: 2 (Fall 2025) that was published this week.

The new issue spotlights works that are written about less often than the titles Updike is best known for, featuring essays on Marry Me: A Romance (Nadia Szold); Marry Me, Couples and The Witches of Eastwick (Sylvie Mathé), Licks of Love (Peter J. Bailey); and “My Father’s Tears” and “The Laughter of the Gods” (Robert Milder).

The focus of “Three Writers On” this issue is “My Father’s Tears,” from Updike’s final short story collection by the same name, with the story reprinted by permission and short essays from D. Quentin Miller, Sue Norton, and James Schiff.

As always, members of The John Updike Society who reside in the U.S. will receive a print copy by mail, while those outside the U.S. will receive a digital copy. To receive the journal, simply become a member of the society. For an institutional membership, please contact James Schiff: james.schiff@uc.edu. Schiff said that since members are convening in New York City this coming weekend for The Roth-Updike Conference, he will try to bring copies so that our international members can have a print copy of the new issue. The John Updike Review is published twice a year by the University of Cincinnati and the John Updike Society and is based at the University of Cincinnati, Dept. of English and Comparative Literature.

Program set for The Roth-Updike Conference in NYC

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Roth-Updike, a joint conference of the Philip Roth and John Updike societies, will begin Sunday, Oct. 19 and end the morning of Oct. 22. Seventy people registered to participate, with attendees getting the chance to interact with members of both societies. Sessions were deliberately designed to encourage everyone to attend both Roth and Updike panels, as there will be no competing concurrent offerings.

Here is the Roth-Updike Conference Program.

Writer David Klion recommends Updike’s Bech chronicles

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“‘[Henry Bech’s] marriage was like the Zionist state they were in: a mistake long deferred, a miscarriage of passé fervor and antiquated tribal righteousness, an attempt to be safe on an earth where there was no safety,’ Updike writes, sizing up Israel better than Bellow ever did through the eyes of a Jew who is accustomed to living in a permanent state of alienation. Reviewing the first Bech volume in Commentary in 1970, Cynthia Ozick accused Updike of dreaming up a false and essentially parodic Jew—but this Jew, for one, found Bech welcome and familiar company.”

So wrote David Klion, who is working on a book about the legacy of neoconservatism and is a columnist for The Nation, a contributing editor at Jewish Currents, and a “writer for many lefty mags.” His review/reading recommendation on The Complete Henry Bech appeared in the Sept. 5, 2025 issue of Jewish Currents under the heading, “Shabbat Reading List.” For those planning on attending the Roth-Updike Conference in New York City October 19-22—a joint conference of the Philip Roth and John Updike Societies—the timing couldn’t be more perfect.

“If the Bech stories were merely affectionate sendups of Roth or experiments in whether a goy can channel a Jew persuasively in fiction,” Klion wrote, “they might just be amusing—and for my purposes, dayeinu. But I became fully invested in Bech as a cranky, horny, self-absorbed, self-effacing, skeptical, and occasionally wise antihero, rendered through Updike’s always lyrical prose. Taken together, the stories constitute an extended comic meditation on bookish fame (or semi-fame), inspiration (or lack thereof), and frustration, complete with a fake bibliography and fake reviews from the likes of Alfred Kazin and Ellen Willis.”

Read the whole review.

Michael Updike talks about gravestone sculpting

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Stewart Lytle, who also gets the photo credit, wrote a nice article on “Michael Updike: Gravestones Don’t Have to be Morbid,” which was published by The Town Common, “The Largest Independent Weekly Community News for the North Shore of Mass. and Coastal NH.”

A familiar site at Updike Society gatherings, Michael Updike is equally familiar on the North Shore art fair circuit. Pilgrims to the Plowville (Pa.) cemetery who go there to see the headstone Michael carved for his father are also familiar with his work, characterized by a heartfelt impulse or emotion offset by a wry-and-dry sense of humor.

“Updike has carved headstones for Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket, Gumby and a frog, ‘who gave his life for science,’ read his epitaph,” Lytle wrote. “Updike created a gravestone for a possum, to absolve his guilt for killing one as a child. He sold the possum memorial slate to a woman who also suffered guilt from a possum’s death.

“On a long thin piece of slate, he carved a headstone for a grasshopper he once crushed with a rock. He placed a rock on top of the slate.

“He is also the carver of the penguins that float near the shore of the Merrimack. He carved the penguins to humor his children, or more likely himself. But many a car driving on Water Street have pulled over to make sure they were not seeing an illusion.”

Read the entire article

Final call for Roth-Updike conference in NYC

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Announcements have been sent to members of The John Updike Society and The Philip Roth Society, but for those who missed it, are on the fence, or are not a member of either society, this is your last chance to attend the ROTH-UPDIKE conference in New York City, Oct. 19-22. Cut-off to reserve a room at the conference hotel, The Walker Greenwich Village, is Sept. 1. After that, all unsold rooms in the conference block will be released to sell to the general public.

The jointly sponsored conference is a first for both societies, and conference directors Aimee Pozorski and Adam Sexton have done a marvelous job of putting together a program. The conference features keynotes by Adam Gopnik, who knew both men, and novelist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and two receptions that are included with registration. See the program and registration materials below.

ROTH-UPDIKE program

Roth-Updike registration

Clouds Hill Books offers Updike bibliographer’s collection for sale

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Updike collectors take note:  The extensive collection of Michael Broomfield (of Broomfield & De Bellis bibliography fame) is for sale, item-by-item, from Clouds Hill Books in Montclair, N.J.

Whether you’re looking to add an item to your collection, buy something to donate to The John Updike Childhood Home, or just curious, the two attached lists also constitute a useful companion to the bibliography, as they give some indication of rarity . . . if selling price is a good barometer.

John Updike – From the Library of Michael Broomfield – List #1

John Updike – From the Library of Michael Broomfield – List #2