1st Summer Creative Writing Seminar for Teens at Updike House is a success

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Under the direction of Dr. Maria Lester and with the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the inaugural Summer Creative Writing Workshop concluded—after perhaps giving a boost to a new generation of writers who got to spend a week thinking and writing inside the house where a young John Updike said his own “creative eggs were hatched.” Here are some scenes from the week. We’ll all look forward to seeing what these young talents will publish in the future.

Three monitors added to enhance Updike childhood home visits

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Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Updike Childhood Home now has three new media screens that loop in Updike interviews, so people can hear the author’s voice as they enjoy ten rooms of unique exhibits that tell the story not only of one of America’s most important writers of his generation, but of the 1930s and ’40s Shillington he loved.

Here’s the link to the vertical video.

 

Author: Updike’s Rabbit captured a tipping point in U.S. history

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In “The First Frames of America’s Slow Fade: John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ Novels,” written for The PineBelt News, Mik Davis began, “A key part of American Literature is to frame the common experience of life with the common aspects of culture. Following the destruction of Europe during WWII, the consumerist culture of America was a key component in our ascension to the world’s dominant superpower. It was not merely having everything that had taken root during previous rings of evolution all at once. It was the combination of societal change, technology, and the expansion of cities, workplaces and culture. It is fitting that not all of this rapid growth can impact everyone. In purely Darwinian terms, someone or something must be left behind.”

One such someone was Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, who, “like Reading, peaked too soon.” Davis argued, “The work of Updike is not meant to be satirical although it does seek to mirror societal change and honestly weather the alteration and abandonment of social mores. However, it is the friction of two worlds in motion that sets him apart from other writers. To  most, the events that set televisions aglow or the songs on the radio are a mood setter. To Updike, they are the changing frames around the portrait of a family and the community in decline. Not crisis. However, one might say the crisis around the family may be the factor that changes those frames over time from a gilded gold-leaf ornate locally-forged metal to a simple hand-painted orange/red wood where the grain shows through and perhaps the knots as well.”

Updike’s favorite dust jacket designer talks about his own work

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John Updike Society members were fortunate to have heard Knopf graphic designer Chip Kidd speak at the society’s third biennial conference in Shillington-Reading, Pa., which Kidd, like Updike, called home. Since then, he’s been busy. Really busy.

In their introduction to an interview they did with Kidd, Fast Company summarized his productive life:  “Today Kidd is approaching 40 years as Associate Art Director at Alfred A. Knopf (he is perhaps best known for designing the book cover of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park). He’s written two novels, several nonfiction books on graphic design, and in 2025 released his first Marvel graphic novel, The Avengers in the Veracity Trap!”

Since he was Updike’s fellow Berks Countian and favorite designer, of course Updike came up during the course of the interview:

“I grew up in the town next to Shillington, Pennsylvania, the town my father grew up in. John Updike’s father was his math teacher. Alfred A. Knopf published John Updike, and I ended up working on his book covers. At some point, I would say in the late ’80s, I introduced myself to him and I told him this circumstance. He was absolutely delighted. We became fellow Shillington-ites.

“He was very prolific so I worked with him for 25 years. He just really enjoyed that connection and when I published my first monograph with Rizzoli in 2006, he wrote the introduction to it. That was just a thrill and an honor for me. This idea of something coming full circle. It sounds fictional, but it’s not.”

Read the whole interview.

 

Rabbit (and Updike) Reconsidered

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The October 2025 publication of Selected Letters of John Updike has occasioned numerous reviews and reactions, but for Kazuo Robinson and The Metropolitan Review it has sparked more of a series of ruminations on Updike and his works. Insights from the letters lead to more insights.

“Writing to Plowville from amidst exams in drama since Ibsen and late Romantic poets, [Updike] predicts that he will not write ‘unread masterpieces’ and thus consign Mary to poverty, but instead please an audience the way he knows he can with his drawings (which were roughly in the manner of James Thurber). This will be as a humorous writer of some kind, and ‘if I am going to be a humorist, I must get the idea of infinity out of my head — there has never been a humorist who lived in infinity; humor is manipulation of limitations, a series of contrasts of finite objects.’ He would treat the writer’s page as an enclosed world, putting on hold the infinite questions, religious and existential, and working up the laughs from the combination of a few elements,” Robinson wrote.

“Updike was not, of course, to limit himself, either in his seeing, his imaginative journeying, or his learning. His fiction in particular, never satisfied with a ‘few elements,’ takes in much sensory information, his metaphors are sometimes extravagant, and he shows his knowledge of literature, theology, physics, history, music, painting, printing, even cars and golf. And then of course there is his own life, the main subject of the letters . . . .”

Read the entire article

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.