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.

Jack De Bellis’ new book, John Updike’s Early Years (Lehigh University Press, cloth, 188pp), will be published in January 2013 and is now available for pre-order through Rowman & Littlefield.

Here’s the link, which includes an extensive description.

Camden House has begun accepting pre-orders for Becoming John Updike: Critical Reception, 1958-2010, by Laurence W. Mazzeno.

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the journalistic and academic response to Updike’s writings.

Mazzeno, President Emeritus of Alvernia University, is a member of the Society. Here’s the link. No cover art is available yet.

Member Larry Randen called our attention to a book written by Nicholas Delbanco, “who was in the class Updike taught at Harvard before he retired from academe in the summer of 1962. It includes a letter dated August 26, 2007 in response to three questions Delbanco asked him (and many others) for his book, “Lastingness: The Art of Old Age” (New York/Boston: Grand Central Publishing, 2011, ISBN 978-0-446-19964-3.”

Randen says that Updike’s response to the form letter sent to writers, quoted in its entirety, appears in Chapter 8, “Gratification.” Also included in a mid-section gallery is a photo of Updike and Delbanco in Bennington, Vermont, 1980, taken by Elena Delbanco.

The third volume of John Updike’s essays on art, Always Looking, is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com for $29.70, 34 percent off the $45.00 list price.

Always Looking will be released in hardcover on November 27, 2012. As with Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005), the 224-page volume will be generously illustrated with photos of the artwork.

Adam Begley, who is under contract to produce an as-yet-untitled biography of John Updike for HarperCollins, writes that the work is going well and that there’s enthusiastic support for the project. In addition to a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship that got him started, he has received a 2011-12 fellowship from The Leon Levy Center for Biography, based on a section from the third chapter that he submitted. The chapter details the 18 months that Updike spent in New York City.

Research is progressing nicely, Begley says, adding that he still was work to do in Pennsylvania and that he’s in the middle of a long fourth chapter about Ipswich. “I spend most of every day with John Updike,” Begley writes, “and after more than two years I can report that I haven’t been bored for a minute.”

Begley says he’s hoping to have a first draft completed by the end of June 2012 so he will be free when new Updike materials at the Houghton Library become available to researchers in July 2012. Publication of the biography is set for sometime in 2013.

Amazon.com has begun accepting preorders for Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism, edited by Christopher Carduff. Here’s the link.

As we reported earlier, Higher Gossip is divided into five sections:

“Real Conversation” consists of two previously published personal essays, one previously published humorous piece, three previously published short fictions, and six poems (”The Lovelorn Astronomer,” “Basium XVI,” “Head of a Girl, at the Met,” “Cafeteria, Mass. General Hospital,” “An Hour Without Color,” and “Not Cancelled Yet.”

“Book Chat” includes three speeches (”Humor in Fiction,” “The Plight of the American Writer,” and “The Written Word”); tributes to Kierkegaard, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Sissman, and Carver; three forewords/afterwords; and 15 book reviews.

“Gallery Tours” features 20 essays on art, and “Pet Topics” contains three previously published essays on science, six musings on Massachusetts (including “Harvard Square in the Fifties,” “Ipswich in the Seventies,” and “Memoirs of a Massachusetts Golfer”), and five post-Golf Dreams writings on golf.

“Table Talk” is the ephemeral category, including remarks made at book conventions, short musing, forewords, addresses, letters, prefaces, notes, and a humorous piece on “The original ending of Self-Consciousness.“