In “From Bedtime Stories to Cultural Struggles: Updike’s Domestic Lens,” Original Magazines examines an Updike short story that appeared in The New Yorker, “Should Wizard Hit Mommy?” The article called Updike’s literary snapshot of a bedtime ritual happening all across … Continue reading →

Since the Selected Letters of John Updike was published in October 2025, there have been dozens of interviews with the volume’s editor, James Schiff, and with Michael Updike, the family’s representative on the John Updike Literary Trust, who also has … Continue reading →

Those who attended the joint Updike and Roth societies conference in Greenwich Village in October 2025 found two groups that, like their namesakes, were friendly rivals . . . mostly friendly. Only one person had an obvious axe to grind, … Continue reading →

John Updike, who died in 2009, would have been 94 today, and we not only remember him but continue to celebrate his virtuosity with language and his audacity to speak what he perceived to be true of human … Continue reading →

Michael Updike has been touring to promote Selected Letters of John Updike—as his father would have done, were he still with us. Interest in Updike has remained high in Ipswich, where the Updike’s lived for many years and where he wrote … Continue reading →

On one of their “Thurber Thursdays,” Ink Spill: New Yorker Cartoonists News, History, and Events was inspired by the recent publication of the Selected Letters of John Updike to do a little sleuthing and post the results. A footnote on … Continue reading →

Atlas Obscura recently added a location for the “Headstone of John Updike; A unique tombstone, lovingly made by the author’s son, honors his literary talents.” “Nestled in a churchyard in the small Pennsylvanian town of Mohnton, a peculiar gravestone stands … Continue reading →

The Nov. 11 episode of BBC’s Front Row spotlighted art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer and radical Christianity, James Schiff on Selected Letters of John Updike, and director Edgar Wright on the new dystopian film The Running Man. The Updike … Continue reading →

There are so many interesting websites, blogs, and YouTube channels that you can find something “new” every day, it seems. Today that new discovery was GOATPoets, which featured John Updike reading “An Oddly Lovely Day Alone,” a poem that has … Continue reading →

Trevor Meek, of The Local News (Ipswich, Mass.), published a Jan. 31, 2026 piece on the Selected Letters of John Updike that began, “Living in Ipswich in the 1960s and ’70s with John Updike as a neighbor meant playing a … Continue reading →

If your pet peeves include people who speak the language with little regard for or knowledge of correctness, you might be interested in a Jan. 10 Quillette article by Bruce Gilley on “Guarding the Gates of Our Language; One hundred years … Continue reading →

Members of The John Updike Society are looking forward to the release of the Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff and scheduled for October publication by Knopf, Updike’s main publisher since 1959. Members who attend the Roth-Updike Conference will … Continue reading →

It’s July 4 in the U.S., and Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is once again in the news—or rather, a think piece. Warning: Though Harry leaned right, The Nation, in which this piece by Jeet Heer appears, leans left. One statistic, though, … Continue reading →

Every creative person has preferred ways of taking a break. For cartoonist Michael Maslin (“Wednesday Spill: Hunting for the Whereabouts of an Updike Moment”), one of those breaks began by looking at his Updike books and pulling one off the … Continue reading →

John Updike’s children recently donated more one-of-a-kind objects to The John Updike Childhood Home & Museum, among them two still life paintings that their father and mother had painted side-by-side while Updike was a student at the Ruskin School of … Continue reading →

LitHub recently published a fascinating piece by Alex Vernon, “Bringing the War Home: How Tim O’Brien Approached the Art of Moral Consequence” (May 27, 2025), in which John Updike featured prominently. The issue was negative versus positive reviews. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s New … Continue reading →

In a June 9, 2025 piece published by The New Statesman, George Monaghan considered “The revenge of the young male novelist; Can good writing solve our crisis of masculinity?” Of course, John Updike came up, and so did a writer … Continue reading →

There’s a website for everything these days, including one on Famous Writing Routines. What works for one writer might not work for another, but when that one writer is John Updike, who wrote more than 60 books during his professional … Continue reading →

As part of a grand centennial year celebration, an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour featured “Louisa Thomas on a Ballplayer’s Epic Final Game,” a remembrance that “naturally gravitated to a story about baseball with a title only comprehensible to baseball … Continue reading →

On the Best American Poetry blog, the April 10, 2025 entry was John Updike’s “Perfection Wasted,” a poem written when the author was dying of lung cancer. Perfection Wasted And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your … Continue reading →