Monthly Archives: July 2014

Daily Beast picks Updike as a Best Biography

Posted on by
Reply

In selecting “The Best Biographies of 2014 (So Far),” The Daily Beast noted, “Only half way into 2014, historical biographies are already having a banner year. Adam Begley’s Updike—a ‘superb achievement’ and ‘brilliant new biography’—is perhaps the most lauded title so far this year in any genre, Ramachandra Guha’s just-published Gandhi Before India is garnering similar buzz, and an armload of other big bios are making waves.”

Of Updike, they wrote:

“The reviews of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike—the prolific novelist, short story writer, critic, poet, and serial philanderer—approach universal acclaim. Wall Street Journal: ‘Begley has a great many strengths—concision, eloquence, an eagle eye—and few of the usual shortcomings.’ Washington Post: ‘[A] convincing interpretative biography, one characterized by suavity, wit, and independent judgment throughout.’ Newsday: ‘Thoroughly researched, written with intelligence, sympathy and grace, it is a model of first-rate literary biography.’ New York Observer: ‘[A] monumental treatment of a towering American writer.'”

WBUR presents The John Updike Radio Files

Posted on by
Reply

Screen Shot 2014-07-04 at 8.46.43 AMRadio Open Source, “arts, ideas & politics with Christopher Lydon,” yesterday posted “The John Updike Radio Files,” which includes a video clip of Lydon interviewing Updike “on the occasion of his second Pulitzer win in 1991 for Rabbit at Rest, from The Ten O’Clock News.”

Adam Begley is also featured. “We’ve discovered some old gems in our radio archives and sprinkled them through a conversation with John Updike’s biographer, Adam Begley, for our show this week.

“Begley talks about Updike’s Pennsylvania boyhood, his wives and lovers north of Boston, his children, his spiritual life, his voracious reading, his travels—and how he created the most graceful prose of our time by cannibalizing all of it for his art.”

Beam us up, Michael

Posted on by
Reply

Screen Shot 2014-07-03 at 8.07.21 AMMichael Updike recently got a chance to look inside the Polly Dole House at 26 East Street in Ipswich where his father and family lived from 1958-1970, because the current tenants were moving out. And he took the opportunity to snap a photo of the nut and washer in the summer beam that his father described in an essay for Architectural Digest, “John Updike: The Houses of Ipswich,” which Begley cites in his biography:

“In the middle of the summer beam, a huge nut and washer terminated a long steel rod that went up to a triangular arrangement of timbers in the attic; at one point the whole house had been lifted by its own bootstraps. I used to tell my children that if we turned the nut the whole house would fall down. We never tried it.”

 

 

John Updike Childhood Home gets a tenant

Posted on by
Reply

RuoffsignageThe John Updike Childhood Home is still being renovated, but the annex built by Dr. Hunter—who lived in the house after the Updikes left and needed additional space for his practice—is being rented as of July 1 to a tenant who grew up in the neighborhood, knew John Updike, and counts Updike’s father, Wesley, among his mentors.

The Borough of Shillington has approved David W. Ruoff Financial Services as a tenant in the annex of The John Updike Childhood Home, in effect establishing an onsite presence and giving the society a small rental income that will go toward monthly utilities, fees, and taxes.

The society reconfigured the annex space so that the former doctor’s waiting room will serve as the museum’s education room, with chairs lined up so groups of 24 or so can listen to speakers, or, thanks to a donation from Bruce Moyer, watch Updike-related videos on a TV monitor. The former doctor’s office has been turned into a museum gift shop, while a bathroom will be shared by the museum and the tenant, who will occupy the rooms that Dr. Hunter used for his examinations. One of those rooms even has an x-ray light that’s still operational.

Both the society board and the tenant are excited about the new arrangement.

“I consider it a privilege to occupy that space which is 1/2 block from where I was raised in Shillington, Pa.,” Ruoff said. “I knew John in his youth, but I knew his father Wesley Updike a lot better. As you know, his father was a math teacher in the Shillington High School for many years. I consider him one of my mentors during my childhood.

MaxwellRuoff said Wesley Updike “would throw snowballs at a blackboard to start showing us how to use the  decimal system: ‘Numbers to the right are smaller, numbers to the left are bigger—you get that David?’

“My mother was born 99 years ago on Philadelphia Ave. Then my grandfather moved the family up to Fourth Street, which is right next to the Jewish cemetery overlooking Shillington and Reading. The family would delight in seeing my grandfather coming from Reading on Lancaster Ave. (now 222) and they had no trouble identifying him because he had the only car in Shillington at that time. He sold spices to hotels, etc., and it was actually a company car”—a 1910 Maxwell.

Ruoff said that “John Updike gave a lot of people around here paranoia—drove everybody crazy figuring out who was who [in the fiction].”

Ruoff, who started his life insurance agency in 1967 and financial service organization in 1974, has joined The John Updike Society and looks forward to sharing stories with members.