NPR spotlights Adam Begley’s biography Updike today, featuring an audio interview and a published version that includes “Interview Highlights”:
“Biographer Explains How John Updike ‘Captured America'”
Asked what kind of dinner guest Updike was, Begley responds, “You would be aware that he was noticing you with terrific intensity, and you might find even that he’d put you in a story next time.”
Jim Higgins, who may be familiar to readers as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel journalist who has been reading an Updike short story weekly and posting his considerations, has been thinking about Updike again—this time in the context of the forthcoming Adam Begley biography, Updike, which will finally be available to the general public next week.
“Adam Begley’s bio makes strong case for rereading ‘Updike'”
John Updike Society president Jim Plath will give a talk on Friday, April 4 at Illinois Wesleyan University as part of the annual Faculty Colloquium series. His presentation is punningly titled “Backdoor Scholarship: A Report on The John Updike Childhood Home.”
“Plath to Discuss ‘Backdoor Scholarship’ and The John Updike Childhood Home”
Even before it falls into the hands of average readers on April 8, Adam Begley’s biography, Updike, is doing what scholars and society members expected: reawakening the debate over Updike’s status as an American writer.
There has always been a small segment who think he “writes like an angel but has nothing to say,” and reports of his demotion in the canon have been greatly exaggerated, given his continued presence in major anthologies. Michael H. Miller of the New York Observer weighs in, but only concludes “Updike, like George Caldwell in The Centaur, a character modeled after his own father, did the best he could with what was given to him—a massive flawed talent. Here’s the whole article:
Vulture.com today posted a story by Updike biographer Adam Begley—a segment, really, from Updike. For those who can’t wait to get a copy, it’s pretty much an official teaser:
“How John Updike Turned Everything in His Life to His Advantage in Fiction”
Updike will be published on April 8, and is currently available in hardcover from Amazon.com for $21.77 or on Kindle for $14.44.
The Friday, March 21 2014 post for The Bully Pulpit blog was titled “John Updike on Falling Airplanes and His Faith in a Fallen World,” in which the writer thoughtfully responds to a long “magisterial” passage from Updike’s Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.
“Updike is a writer who pulls the sublime from effortless, conversational sentences, affirming his reflection that ‘to give the mundane its beautiful due’ was the purpose of his writing style. And man, do you feel the power of that impulse in these memoirs,” JR Benjamin writes. He considers as well a poem by Philip Larkin and concludes, “Not to put too fine a point on the issue, but I think the contemporary American Church, with its Hollywood aesthetic and prosperity gospel, has lost much of that crucial, validating seriousness” both that informed both Larkin’s and Updike’s sense of religion and church-going.
A collection of 25 issues of the Shillington High School newspaper, the Chatterbox—to which John Updike contributed both artwork and written features—is being sold on April 2 by Heritage Auctions.
Interested buyers may also place bids online, starting now. The minimum opening bid is $2000. The mimeographed issues of the Chatterbox are from the collection of the late Barry Nelson, a classmate of Updike’s and the sports editor of the newspaper while Updike was on the staff.
The 25 issues are from Updike’s junior and senior years, and include 81 contributions from him—including his famous “Ode to the Seniors” poem, in which the first letter of each line collectively spelled “Seniors Stink.”
A full list of the publications is at the Heritage Auctions website. Note that a 25 percent buyer’s premium will be added to the winning bid.
On October 7, 2014, Everyman’s Library will publish a 50th-anniversary edition of Olinger Stories, by John Updike. Originally published in the fall of 1964 as a Vintage paperback original, this Everyman’s edition will mark the book’s first appearance in hardcover—and its return to print as a separate volume after being out of print for about 40 years.In an interview, Updike once said, “If I had to give anybody one book of me, it would be the Olinger Stories.” These stories were originally published in The New Yorker and then in various collections before Vintage first put them together in one volume in 1964, as a paperback original. They follow the life of one character from the age of ten through manhood, in the small Pennsylvania town of Olinger (pronounced, according to Updike, with a long O and a hard G), which was loosely based on Updike’s own hometown. “All the stories draw from the same autobiographical well,” Updike explained, “the only child, the small town, the grandparental home, the move in adolescence to a farm.” The selection was made and arranged by Updike himself, and was prefaced by a lovely 1,400-word essay by the author that has never been reprinted in full elsewhere until now.”
Adam Gopnik wrote a feature titled “A Fan’s Notes on Updike’s Long Game” for Humanties magazine, Vol. 29 No. 3 (May/June 2008) that finds him concluding that “if the persistent journalist in him is one of the things that has kept his novels alive, it is the satirist and humorist in him that have kept his sentences aloft,” further speculating, “Updike’s affinity for painting and poetry—the still felt desire to have been a painter or poet—is perhaps the secret fuel that keeps the prose shining and still in motion.”
Today, John Updike’s birthday, Garrison Keillor published a written and audio version of “Frankie Laine,” a poem by Updike that begins, “The Stephens’ Sweet Shop, 1949.” In it, Updike recalls the atmosphere of the popular hangout for Shillington H.S. students and pays poetic tribute to its owner.
“The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, Tuesday, March 18, 2014”