Apart from the poem “Ex-Basketball Player” and short stories like “A&P,” Updike isn’t taught much in American high schools because of the language and sexual content that’s sprinkled liberally throughout his Rabbit series and other classics. But that may change with the republication of Olinger Stories by Everyman’s Pocket Classics, which will be released on October 7, 2014.

Ironically, we received a review copy smack in in the middle of Banned Books Week, and the handsome, bargain-priced ($16 SRP) hardcover with Updike’s hand-picked stories gives high school teachers a classroom-worthy book—one that Updike himself considered “his signature collection, the volume of short stories that communicated his freshest impressions of life as it came to him in hardscrabble Berks County, Pennsylvania, in the 1930s and ‘40s,” as a publisher’s note reminds us. Updike once told an interviewer, “If I had to give anybody one book of me, it would be the Olinger Stories.”

There’s a delightful world of language, of place, and of finding one’s place in the world to discover for readers new to Updike. But this new volume may work for scholars as well, because, as the publisher’s note continues, the “text of the stories reprinted here are those that Updike published in The Early Stories, which he deemed definitive,” along with a foreword to the original 1964 Vintage paperback “altered only to incorporate a few small changes made by the author after its initial publication.”

Included, in order, are the stories “You’ll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You,” “The Alligators” (which is already being taught in some high schools), “Pigeon Feathers” (also being taught), “Friends from Philadelphia,” “A Sense of Shelter,” “Flight,” “The Happiest I’ve Been,” “The Persistence of Desire,” “The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island,” “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car,” and “In Football Season.” Right now, Amazon.com is selling the collection for $10.12.  

Olinger, of course, is Shillington, and anyone who’s recently read Jack De Bellis’s John Updike’s Early Years or the new Adam Begley biography, Updike, will recognize a number of passages that could pass for non-fiction, if the names hadn’t been altered.

In “Flight,” for example, knowledgeable readers will be reminded of Updike’s own living situation. He and his parents moved in with his maternal grandparents, who bought the Shillington house now owned by the Updike Society as a city house and never thought to sell the Plowville farm until the stock market crashed: “Laboring in the soil had never been congenial to my grandfather, though with his wife’s help he prospered by it. Then, in an era when success was hard to avoid, he began to invest in stocks. In 1922 he bought our large white home in the town—its fashionable section had not yet shifted to the Shale Hill side of the valley—and settled in to reap his dividends. He believed to his death that women were foolish, and the broken hearts of his two [Updike’s mother and maternal grandmother] must have seemed specially so.”

Updike turns a phrase the way a woodworker turns a lathe, offering more details with every revolution: “Friday was his holiday, and he drank. His drinking is impossible for me to picture, for I never knew him except as an enduring, didactic, almost Biblical old man, whose one passion was reading the newspapers and whose one hatred was of the Republican party.”

In the stories there are details about the house, the neighborhood, the family members, and the hardships that were a part of Updike’s childhood. The stories are equally rich in ideas and emotions, the things that students depend upon for class discussion. And the stories come packaged in a richly bound edition with sewed-in bookmark and slick, full-color dust jacket.

Olinger Stories is a handsome little volume that presents the best of Updike and Updike’s Pennsylvania—a more wholesome, more introspective companion to the Rabbit quartet, or poetic books like The Centaur and Of the Farm. This new collection reinforces, for a new generation of readers, how much this little corner of the world meant to Updike, and how important those first 18 years can be for a writer.

reviewed by James Plath