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

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In case you haven’t happened upon it yet, above is the cover art that HarperCollins Publishers posted on their website, along with additional information on the upcoming biography by Adam Begley. The publication date is April 8, 2014, and the HarperCollins website provides a detailed description:

Updike is Adam Begley’s masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike—a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.

In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing “middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities.”

Updike explores the stages of the writer’s pilgrim’s progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer’s colleagues, friends, and family, Begley explores how Updike’s fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life—including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his first-hand experience of the “adulterous society” he was credited with exposing in the bestselling Couples.

With a sharp critical sensibility that lends depth and originality to his analysis, Begley probes Updike’s best-loved works—from Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy—and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Updike offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure, a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else’s.

The 560-page biography has a suggested retail price of $29.99.

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In his review of David Gilbert’s novel & Sons for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Mark Athitakis called it “a big, fat novel that’s a commentary on big, fat novels.

“It has a great man at its center: A.N. Dyer, an aging author whose style mashes up John Updike, Philip Roth and John Irving,” Athitakis wrote.

“The novel also celebrates the power of words—Gilbert invents swaths of Dyer’s prose, which is stylistically distinct from his own. But Gilbert also exposes the shallowness of those words,” he adds, and “it often feels like a postmodern novel in realist drag.”

Coincidentally, Gilbert’s first novel, The Normals: A Novel (2004), focused on a Harvard-educated protagonist. Photo: David Gilbert.

The National Lampoon, which was published from 1970-1998, was a spinoff of the Harvard Lampoon, the irreverent humor publication based at Lampoon Castle in Cambridge, which John Updike Society members saw during the Second Biennial Conference in Boston.

Tours of the building where Updike once served as Lampoon president were not possible because of the organization’s commitment to secrecy. But a description of the interior appears in That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick: The National Lampoon and the Comedy Insurgents Who Captured the Mainstream—a recently published history:

“Much as the HL’s frivolity departs from Harvard’s overall serious-mindedness, so its home resembles an elaborate and charming joke, an unusually whimsical exception to the order and harmony of the university’s architectural vernacular. Although called the Castle, the building is only three stories. However, it does have a tower with a pointed roof, atop which perches the Ibis, the organization’s frequently stolen mascot. Vaguely medieval detailing such as emblazoned wooden doors and leaded glass windows add a certain baronial flair. Upstairs is the Great Hall, a big room that looks like a Hollywood version of something called “The Great Hall” down to its vaulted ceiling and magnificent sixteenth-century Elizabethan fireplace, suitable for smashing plates and glassware against (the building comes complete with a maintenance staff to clean it up). The walls along a winding staircase are covered with framed covers of HL projects dating back to the founding of the organization/publication by seven undergraduates in 1876.”

Chapter 1, “Lampy’s Castle,” also discusses some of the “quaint traditions” of the Lampoon. That’s Not Funny is available through Amazon.

Related story: “Editor’s Choice: ‘That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick'”