Today, Alvernia University and The John Updike Society announced that Alvernia will host the Society’s very first conference October 1-3, 2010. The conference will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rabbit, Run, and it’s appropriate that Alvernia is hosting. The University was founded in 1958, the very same year that Updike saw publication of his first book, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures. A Call for Papers will be issued soon, and information on the program, hotels, tours, etc., will be posted on the Conference Information page on the Society website left menu as details become available. They will also be posted on the Official Conference Web Page. The full press release is on the Conference Information page.
The conference will include the usual offering of panels featuring papers presented by Updike scholars and aficionados, along with panels with Updike’s Shillington High School classmates. It’s expected that at least some Updike family members will attend, and that the keynote speaker will be a writer who knew Updike. But for members of The John Updike Society, the real treat will be seeing Updike’s childhood home in Shillington, as well as remnants of the old poorhouse wall, sites mentioned in Rabbit, Run, and the farmhouse in Plowville. The owners of Updike’s childhood home and the Plowville farm are members of the Society, and they’ve graciously offered to open their doors to members for a tour. Visitors can also see the Reading Eagle where Updike worked summers as a copy boy, and eat at the Peanut Bar across the street where Updike and journalists hung out. And of course there’s the famed Pagoda rising above Reading, which Updike renamed the Pinnacle in Rabbit, Run, and the Reading Public Library, whose balconies Updike deemed “cosmically mysterious.”
The directors for the First Biennial John Updike Society Conference are Society co-founders Jack De Bellis, who will assemble the program, and Updike’s Shillington contact, Dave Silcox, who will serve as site director. So members, put October 1-3 2010 on your calendars and start saving for a trip to Pennsylvania for this doubly historic conference: the first for the Society, and a 50th anniversary celebration of Rabbit, Run.
Pictured: The Quad at Alvernia University; a young John Updike reading on the front porch of his home in Shillington; and the house as it looked in May 2009, when the Reading Public Library hosted a tribute to the author.