Amazon.com usually offers a “look inside” so you can see the Table of Contents of a book or read an excerpt, but they haven’t done that yet for Adam Begley’s forthcoming (April 8) biography of John Updike. So we thought we’d provide that service. A review will come later, but for now, here’s a peek inside Updike, which will be published by HarperCollins:

Table of Contents
Introduction
I. A Tour of Berks County
II. The Harvard Years
III. The Talk of the Town
IV. Welcome to Tarbox
V. The Two Iseults
VI. Couples
VII. Updike Abroad
VIII. Tarbox Redux
IX. Marrying Martha
X. Haven Hill
XI. The Lonely Fort
XII. Endpoint
Notes
Credits
Acknowledgments
Index

The book runs 576 pages, with a 6×9 trim size and a 16-page black-and-white photo insert. Blurbs are from Joyce Carol Oates (“A beautifully written, richly detailed, and warmly sympathetic portrait of a great American writer”), Stacy Schiff (“Adam Begley has done him proud, offering up Updike the man and Updike the writer in an exuberant, stunningly choreographed pas de deux”), Francine Prose (“Adam Begley’s Updike is a model of what a literary biography should be . . .”), Ann Beattie (“…a social history in which one man’s heart, mind, and talent came to resonate with an entire society”), and Janet Malcolm (“Adam Begley tells the story of John Updike’s life in art with brilliant tautness, as if he were writing a novel”).

From a discussion of Rabbit, Run in the “Welcome to Tarbox”chapter:

“It’s possible that the cuts were unnecessary, that no legal challenge would have been forthcoming. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita had been published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1958, attracting considerable controversy but no prosecutions; by January of 1959, Lolita had reached the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list. In July of 1959, the U.S. Post Office ban on the unexpurgated Grove Press edition of Lady Chatterly’s Lover was overturned in federal court, and Lawrence’s novel also climbed the bestseller list. But two years later, when Grove published an American edition of Henry Miller’s previously banned Tropic of Cancer, dozens of booksellers were arrested and obscenity cases filed coast to coast. In a bizarre twist, as if to fulfill Knopf’s dark prophecy, charges of conspiracy were filed in a Brooklyn court against both the publisher, Barney Rosser, and Henry Miller himself; when Miller declined to appear before the grand jury, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. Neither man went to jail, and in any case Tropic of Cancer is a much bawdier book; it’s deliberately, even gleefully salacious in a way Rabbit, Run isn’t. (“The novels of Henry Miller,” Updike once quipped, are not novels, they are acts of intercourse strung alternately with segments of personal harangue”). Yet Updike, in this uncertain climate, was perhaps wise to conclude that self-censorship was preferable to state censorship.”