Teacher talks of being starstruck, and falling stars

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In a brief humorous piece that reads like a cocktail party anecdote, Dianne Mcknight-Warren shared “How Dinner With John Updike Ruined My Teaching Career.” 

“When I was in graduate school, I’d lived in the same town as Updike. He had movie star status, but I never saw him. I worked in a restaurant where he drank a Heineken once at the bar and the bartender got his autograph for me: ‘For Diane who waitresses and teaches all at once–John updike.’ And one night when I wasn’t working he came in for dinner and the manager saved me the carbon from his American Express. I could see his signature if I held it up to a light.”

Read the rest of the story about her 1989 Christmas Eve dinner.

Millennials advised to read John Updike

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In “No One Reads John Updike—And Why Millennial Americans Should,” Tom Vondriska writes with the kind of persuasive flourish that is appropriate to an essay about America’s great stylist of the last half of the 20th century.

Contemplating America’s 250th anniversary, Vondriska writes that “only the superannuated medium of the novel can do proper justice to national self reflection. By slowing it down. Moby Dick, Walden (a novel in feel, if not content), Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, and On the Road timestamp America across decades and centuries. The time period most resonant for extant Americans in 2026—that is, the decades after the war—has a single literary protagonist whose life traces the arc of the American century and whose story reveals how this country dealt with finding itself at the center of the world. His name is Harry Angstrom and he was created by John Updike, who called him Rabbit.

“No one reads John Updike in 2026” because “Updike does not fit in a basket Americans feel comfortable, in 2026, peering into. His writing is not didactic. There is no moral in tow. His characters are not progressive for the time he writes in (1950-1990, mostly) and certainly not for the present day. He does not rely on postmodern hijinks and stupid tricks to keep the reader engaged. There are no meta-textual, show-offy pyrotechnics.The author does not seek to confuse the readers or make them feel stupid. The characters are not created to be redeemed and if they grow or change, this is incidental. The characters are not created to be liked. There are no wizards, or time travel, or vampires, no strange inter-textual monkey business with trippy dreamlike surrealism transporting the reader to some altered state of confabulated vertigo. But the writing is simply the most flawless prose in the English language in the 20th century. The characters are set loose in the real world, in America, and make their way. The most famous of Updike’s creations and the one whose life tells the greatest literary story about post-1945 America is Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom”

Read the entire essay.

Quote about creativity is traced back to Updike

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Quote Investigator, which tracks down the sources of quotes, was asked, “Exalted activities such as composing a symphony or devising an invention clearly enable the maker to express creativity. Refreshingly, the prominent writer John Updike contended that even quotidian activities allowed for creativity if the doer cared enough to excel. Would you please help me find a citation?”

The reply: “In 1968 Playboy magazine contacted several well-known writers and asked each one to compose a short piece about creativity. The group included John Updike, Arthur Miller, Le Roi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and James T. Farrell. Updike propounded an expansive notion of creativity” and Updike’s tracked-down quote is reproduced. “For one thing, creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity; the ditchdigger, dentist and artist go about their tasks in much the same way, and any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”

That December 1968 Playboy also included responses from Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg,  and William Styron in a round-up titled “Symposium on Creativity.”

Quote Investigator reports that Updike’s complete remarks written for that 1968 Playboy were reprinted in his 1975 non-fiction collection Picked-Up Pieces, which was then quoted by a Los Angeles Times book reviewer . . . “hence, the quotation received a wider circulation.”

Composer sets Updike poems to music

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In 2003, Paul Salerni, a music professor at Lehigh University, set five poems written by John Updike to music composed for soprano and viola. His composition, Flora, incorporates Updike’s “Query,” “Spring Song,” “Bindweed,” “Natural Question,” and “Sunflower.”

Here is a link to a site where you can click on each of the five poem titles and be taken to a page that features the poem reproduced in total and also a link that you can click on to hear the song, sung by soprano Debra Field.

 

Author: Updike anticipated the MAGA movement

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On July 3, 2026, Rashmee Roshan Lall mentioned Updike in This Week, Those Books, which aims to provide “in roughly five minutes, crucial context—from fiction and non-fiction—to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.” The “Big Story” this week was, of course, America’s 250th birthday. Of Updike, Lall writes,

“Considering America’s 250th birthday is supervised by President Donald Trump, it’s worth examining this novel by one of the country’s greatest 20th-century writers. This John Updike novel is a forerunner of MAGA nostalgia for a golden past set in the 1950s. It’s the second book in Updike’s quartet of novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Set in the late 1960s, we see a restless Harry. He has moved on from his schooldays as a basketball star of his small Pennsylvanian town of Brewer. Now, he is now a Linotype operator in a local factory. He has a teenage son, a cooling marriage and feels an increasing sense of irritation at the racial and cultural changes underway. He feels that the America he knew is slipping away. Harry is a nice chap in all sorts of ways, but it really does feel like he shares a lot with Trump’s angry, working-class base.”

Choice Quote (from Rabbit Redux): “It’s as if, all these Afro hair bushes and gold earrings and hoopy noise on buses, seeds of some tropical plant sneaked in by the birds were taking over the garden. His garden. Rabbit knows it’s his garden and that’s why he’s put a flag decal on the back window of the Falcon even though Janice says it’s corny and fascist. In the papers you read about these houses in Connecticut where the parents are away in the Bahamas and the kids come in and smash it up for a party. More and more this country is getting like that. As if it just grew here instead of people laying down their lives to build it.”

Read the whole post.

UK Times names ‘Rabbit, Run’ one of America’s Top 25 works of literature

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The Times (UK) paid tribute to the United States of America’s 250th anniversary by asking critics to name “their favourite American films, books, TV shows, and more, from Star Wars to Campbell’s Soup.”

For the literature category, Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times chief literary critic for Culture & Books, selected John Updike’s Rabbit, Run as one of her 25 best—and that’s over the entire 250-year span of American literature. Here’s what she wrote:

Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)

In high school Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was a basketball star. Now 26, he is trapped in the comfortable disappointments of postwar suburbia: a deadening sales job selling MagiPeelers, a marriage to an alcoholic and a nagging sense that life has passed him by. So Rabbit runs, gets lost and ends up returning to his home town to live with a former prostitute. What follows is one of the great American quests for freedom, rendered in prose of extraordinary beauty and precision. Updike brings to ordinary lives the attentiveness once reserved for kings and heroes, finding poetry, desire and spiritual yearning in every detail. He can make the mundane shimmer. The first in a tetralogy chronicling Rabbit’s life across four decades, this begins an unrivalled portrait of postwar America, turning the life of a drifting former basketball star into one of the defining stories of the 20th century.

Updike, whose father once walked a Fourth of July parade dressed as Uncle Sam, as did his hero, Rabbit, this latest honor would have been icing on the USA 250th anniversary cake.

From the Updike Casitas: Pietrzyk shares a short story

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Leslie Pietrzyk, the 2025 John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellow, shared a link to a short story she wrote during her two-week residency at the casitas formerly owned by John and Martha Updike, where the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner spent time golfing and writing in his later years. The casitas, located in the Santa Catalina Foothills, are owned by Jan and Jim Emery, and the annual residency is made possible by their generosity.

Pietrzyk was working on her proposed project, Nothing to See Here, a collection of linked stories about a neighborhood girl who disappears from a Midwestern town, written not as a police procedural or Gone Girl mystery, but rather to address the “emotional impact of growing up in a time and place where girls and women disappear.” She talks briefly about her project in this interview.

Lead judge Robert M. Luscher, an Updike society board member, praised Pietrzyk for tackling a “variety of significant cultural issues in its metaphoric critique of female disappearance. Though these stories of peripheral, collateral damage are set in the 1970s, sadly their themes are even more relevant today than the time during which the stories take place.”

Pietrzyk has published three novels (Pears on a Willow Tree, A Year and a Day, and Silver Girl), one historical novel (Reversing the River), and two short story collections (This Angel on My Chest and Admit This to No One). Her story “Stay There” won a 2020 Pushcart Prize, and she was named co-winner of the Polish American Historical Association’s 2020 Creative Arts Prize for promoting “an awareness of the Polish experience in the Americas” through her fiction. Previously she completed residencies at Hawthornden Castle, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Wolff Cottage (in Fairhope, Ala.), The Hambidge Center, and an ARGS Residency in St. Petersburg, Va.

Here is the link to the short story, which was published in New Ohio Review, and a link to more information about the John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship and other grants and awards available from The John Updike Society.

Author talks about Ipswich, Updike, and her ‘Couples’-inspired novel

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Jenny Jackson is vice president and editorial director of fiction at Alfred A. Knopf, but that’s not her only connection to John Updike. As she wrote in a June 30, 2026 piece in Book Riot, “I grew up in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a seaside town north of Boston famous for three things: beer, clams, and John Updike.

“The celebrated author wrote his biggest books, including the Rabbit novels, while living on East Street, a few blocks from my house. Ipswich is a small town, and Updike was very much a celebrity in the midst, winning every major literary prize, appearing on the cover of Life magazine, and regularly contributing to the New Yorker.

“But he wasn’t a reclusive star; instead, he was enmeshed in the social fabric of the town, playing volleyball with a big gang of friends, parenting his small children alongside a dozen other couples, and conducting messy extramarital affairs with a few of them.”

Jackson said The Shampoo Effect was inspired by Couples and, in fact, asks the question, What would Updike’s steamy 1968 novel be like if it were published today, gossip in an era of cell phones and social media? Read the entire article.

Jackson also wrote a piece for Literary Hub (“Jenny Jackson on the Literary Potential of Gossip”) in which she identified a second , “The second inspiration for The Shampoo Effect came from a less literary (but equally Massachusetts) fixation. In 2007, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady famously had a baby with the actress Bridget Moynahan while dating the supermodel Gisele Bundchen. Brady and Bridget Moynahan were no longer together, and he was with Gisele by the time Bridget realized she was pregnant. It was a tabloid sensation, a love triangle that paid salaries across Us Weekly and Page Six. So, these two gossipy scandals tangled together in my mind to become a novel.” Read the entire article.

In Memoriam: Alexander Bernhard

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We regret to report the passing of Alexander Alfred Bernhard, who died in Boston at the age of 89 on June 15, 2026. Though Alexander was not known personally by The John Updike Society, members certainly knew of him. He and first wife Martha Bernhard, who would become Updike’s second wife, were part of the couples group that Updike wrote about in his 1968 bestselling novel Couples. Bernhard’s first marriage and the children produced were not mentioned in the obituary, nor was a second marriage to Joyce Harrington, who was part of another couple from those Ipswich years.

According to the obituary, Bernhard led a “peripatetic life,” attending high school in Mexico City, graduating from MIT in 1957, serving in the US Navy with the majority of time spent in the submarine force, and eventually settling on a career in law after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1964—just four years before the publication of Updike’s scandalous novel. After a stint as clerk for the 9th circuit of the US Court of Appeals in San Francisco, Bernhard settled into a career as a corporate lawyer at Hale & Dorr (now Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr) in Boston for 32 years. “He had a profound sense of community and was active with many nonprofit organizations,” the obituary noted. In 2004, he and his wife, Myra, founded The Friends of the Northern Rail Trail, which “successfully converted the abandoned Boston and Maine train line from Concord, NH to Lebanon, NH into a year-round walking and biking trail.”

The society offers its deepest sympathies to his surviving wife, Myra, three sons, and seven grandchildren.