James Schiff’s long-awaited Selected Letters of John Updike will be released on Oct. 21, 2025, with a reading-booksigning-publication party scheduled that evening at the Salmagundi Club in New York City, where Schiff is in town to convene with other members of The John Updike Society for a joint Roth-Updike Conference with the Philip Roth Society.

The volume of Updike’s selected letters, decades in the making and years in the gathering, runs a whopping 912 pages and is published by Alfred A. Knopf, Updike’s publisher.

Early reviews have been positive . . . and insightful.

Kirkus Reviews
“Missives from the mountain. Updike . . . wrote to everyone, from famous writers and politicians to librarians and family members. ‘I can’t believe that you’re cutting ‘Spider-Man,’ he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe in 1994; after the letter, the Globe reinstated the comic strip. . . . In 1960, he wrote to publisher Alfred A. Knopf that his novels sought to present an image of an averagely physical young American.’ He resisted censorship, feeling that to cave to it would be ‘to funk my job.’ At times, though, he can be dead-on in his judgments: ‘I feel in general that literary history is too much modelled on biology when it is really more like geology. There is not much evolution; there is a great deal of accidental thrusts and upheavals and whatnot and when it’s all over a map is drawn.”
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WSJ – The Wall Street Journal, reviewed by Thomas Mallon
“In ‘Selected Letters of John Updike,’ a new and predictably enormous collection of Updike’s correspondence, we see all his lovers, spouses, neighbors and children as persons, and we experience Updike himself with even more candor than he displayed in his first-person essays. . . . The letters illuminate the consistency of Updike’s fiction aesthetic. Remarkably, at 19, he wrote of the need for ‘an author who can see America as clearly as Sinclair Lewis, but, unlike Lewis, is willing to take it to his bosom.’ He would maintain, decade after decade, that style ‘is nothing less than the writer’s habits of mind—it is not a kind of paint applied afterwards, but the very germ of the thing.”
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The New York Times, reviewed by Dwight Garner
“Schiff estimates Updike typed some 25,000 letters and postcards over the course of his life. . . . Some 700 of them have been resurfaced by the indefatigable Schiff, who teaches at the University of Cincinnati and is the founding editor of The John Updike Review. Despite Updike’s distance-creating geniality, what an enormous and beneficent bounty these letters are for anyone who cares about this country’s literature during the last half century.”
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Airmail, reviewed by Thomas Beller
“A fraction of the total, Schiff’s selection is still 822 pages long. At the outset, one feels a sense of fatigue and even dread about the climb ahead. By the middle, I was engrossed. And as I came to the last pages, I was surprised to feel a welling up of grief. . . . I felt a gratitude toward Updike at the end of this book that exceeded the feelings upon concluding one of his stories or novels. Maybe it was just nostalgia now that he is gone. Or maybe it’s that Updike’s industriousness, order, lyrical precision, and outbursts of libidinal energy now seem more attractive than they once did.”
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The American Conservative, reviewed by Peter Tonguette
“The superb, revelatory Selected Letters of John Updike gives an indication of the eagerness with which Updike wrote to friends, family members, both his wives, countless editors, and even the occasional critic. . . . Schiff presents Updike’s correspondence in chronological order, which gives the reader the pleasure of tracking the development of his intellect and the attainment of his aims, professional (in the form of contributions to the New Yorker) and personal (expressed most vividly in his marriage to his first wife, the former Mary Pennington, and the birthi of their four children). Some of the earliest correspondence gathered here reflects Updike’s youthful drive to become a cartoonist, though even in these examples, his gift with words shines through most clearly. . . . As Schiff promises, Updike’s letters commemorate and valorize everyday existence with as much vigor as his fiction.”
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The Atlantic, reviewed by Adrienne LaFrance
“Updike’s letters could constitute the outline for a never-published Updike novel. The writing is variously winking, earnest, desperate, oversexed, and ambitious. . . . And Updike is, as ever, captivating on the page. He experiments with format: Lists are often deployed for comic effect, as are the occasional doodle, self-portrait, or caricature. An otherwise mundane detail can be, in his hands, stop-and-read-it-twice beautiful.”
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The Hudson Review, reviewed by William H. Pritchard
“James Schiff’s editorial guidance, here and everywhere, is clarifying, always helpful and refusing to take sides when a situation like the one with Begley or Crews threatens. . . . Mine and another reader’s letters of dissent are similarly treated with place and date of publication. Both extensive in fullness and unfailingly perceptive in critical viewpoint, this edition is a model of what such an edition should be.”
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The New Statesman, reviewed by James Marcus
“By 14, he was already submitting poems and drawings to the New Yorker. To an adolescent living in a cramped Pennsylvania farmhouse, the magazine was a distant beacon of literary craft and urban élan. He would not appear in its pages for a decade. Yet the first letter here to capture Updike’s characteristic tone, written when he was 19, is a defence of that very publication, aimed at a local newspaper columnist who bragged that she had cancelled her subscription: ‘Eustace Tilley [the caricature on the magazine’s cover] is grey now about the temples, his walk is less buoyant, he pants slightly as he climbs the steep staircase to the humour he attained once without apparent straining. But he is not as ancient as you would have it; he is still wearing a contemplative sneer.'”
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The Telegraph (UK), reviewed by Lisa Halliday
“In addition to editors, parents, grandparents, wives, lovers, children, in-laws, and grandchildren, Updike corresponded with a formidable roster of literary luminaries, including Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Erica Jong, John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Italo Calvino, Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood, Cynthia Ozick, Mary McCarthy, Muriel Spark, Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro. . . . Updike also wrote to cartoonists, the Pentagon, politicians, college presidents, a woman who’d invited him to judge the Miss Universe pageant (he declined), a boy with psoriasis (‘In Latin it is called morbus fortiorum–the disease of the strong’), and the ‘Gentlemen’ at Agri-Fab Inc.: ‘Whenever I go to use the garden cart manufacdtured by your company, the tires are flat or nearly so’. . . . Among Schiff’s many judicious interventions are an excellent introduction and the reproduction of some of Updike’s letters, postcards, telegrams and drawings, including a sketch Updike made of his first child the day after she was born. Letters have a singular facticity, an immediacy and fidelity to their moment that no biographer working retrospectively can match.”
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The Times (UK), reviewed by David Mills
“After catching up with his old university friend Joanna Brown, in May 1966,John Updike sent her a thank-you. ‘It was lovely to see you, to hear you, to make love with you on Tuesday; I am sorry that I had that little asthmatic seizure.’ A few weeks later he is gratefully writing to his neighbour Joan Cudhea, enjoying that when he left her house, she, ‘still naked, hugged me and laughed and said, “Well, come around and f*** me again some time”‘. . . . It’s a pity that the English edition has been lumbered with the misleading title A Life in Letters. It isn’t that. It is, as the American edition has it, the Selected Letters of John Updike. Whatever, it is brilliant: riveting and essential for anyone remotely interested in Updike; shockingly salacious enough to enthral the remotely curious; and cleverly annotated for easy reading.”
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