Jack De Bellis’s John Updike’s Early Years is now available at Amazon.com.

John Updike’s Early Years first examines his family, then places him in the context of the Depression and World War II. Relying upon interviews with former classmates, the next chapters examine Updike’s early life and leisure activities, his athletic ability, social leadership, intellectual prowess, comical pranks, and his experience with girls. Two chapters explore Updike’s cartooning and drawing, and the last chapter explains how he modeled his characters on his schoolmates. Lists of Updike’s works treating Pennsylvania, and a compilation of contributions to his school paper are included, along with profiles of all students, faculty and administrators during his years at Shillington High School.

A number of Society members have asked about the status of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike, so we asked Begley, who reports that as of today he’s written about 140,000 words and has roughly 25,000 to go.

“My deadline, according to the contract with HarperCollins, is the end of May 2013,” Begley writes. “If the Houghton opens the Updike archive as promised in early January, I should be finished on time.”

If that happens, Begley speculates that there’s a good chance the book will be published in early 2014.

Anyone with information or leads can send their suggestions directly to Begley  (acbegley@gmail.com). Although the biography is not authorized by the Updike Estate, there is still considerable interest.

Bob Batchelor’s “John Updike: A Critical Biography,” which will be published by Praeger on April 30, 2013, is now available for pre-order at Amazon.

Here’s the description of the hardcover (226-page) book:

Widely considered “America’s Man of Letters,” John Updike is a prolific novelist and critic with an unprecedented range of work across more than 50 years. No writer has ever written from the variety of vantages or spanned topics like Updike did. Despite being widely recognized as one of the nation’s literary greats, scholars have largely ignored Updike’s vast catalog of work outside the Rabbit tetralogy. This work provides the first detailed examination of Updike’s body of criticism, poetry, and journalism.

Examining Updike’s criticism and journalism, popular culture scholar Bob Batchelor shows how that work played a central role in transforming his novels. The book disputes the common misperception of Updike as merely a chronicler of suburban, middle-class America by focusing on his novels and stories that explore the wider world, from the groundbreaking The Coup (1978)  to Terrorist (2006). John Updike: A Critical Analysis asks readers to reassess Updike’s career by tracing his transformation over half a century of writing.