The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced on March 22, 2011 the winners of their annual literature awards—including the inaugural John Updike Award, a  $20,000 prize established by Mrs. John Updike in memory of her husband. The award will be given biennially to a writer “in mid-career who has demonstrated consistent excellence.” The Academy’s 250 members nominate candidates, and a rotating committee of writers selects the winners. This year’s committee members were Paula Fox, Philip Levine, Romulus Linney, Alison Lurie, and Joy Williams.

The committee selected Tom Sleigh, who teaches poetry at Hunter College, as the first John Updike Award recipient. Like Updike, Sleigh writes in multiple genres, but he is perhaps best known for his seven books of poetry and his plays, five of which have been produced. Sleigh publishes frequently in The New Yorker and has won numerous literary prizes, including the Kingsley Tufts Award for poetry (a $100,000 prize). Here’s a link to “Hunter-Gatherer,” which appeared in the September 17, 2009 New Yorker. His most recent collection is Army Cats: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2011).

George W. Hunt, well known among Updike scholars for his seminal early monograph, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion, and Art, died Friday, Feb. 25, 2011, of cancer. An obituary in America: The National Catholic Weekly reports that Hunt, 74, was editor of America from 1984-98 and a literary scholar who published on John Cheever as well.

But to Updike scholars and aficionados he was one of the most astute critics among us. His 1980 book used, as a point of departure, Updike’s famous essay on “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood” (Assorted Prose, 1965) and examined how sex, religion, and art permeate and inform Updike’s work.

The Pennsylvania Humanities Council “Humanities on the Road” Season 1 broadcast schedule includes a Dec. 3 program on John Updike’s Pennsylvania that will also be viewable via Internet streaming.

The program by Society member Frank Fitzpatrick (pictured), who’s a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is illustrated with slides of Berks County locations important to Updike’s world. It will air on PCN-TV Friday, Dec. 3 from 6-7 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 4 from 2-3 p.m., and Monday, Dec. 6, from 10-11 a.m. The shows are also available as streaming videos during broadcast on www.pcntv.com, offered On Demand to Comcast subscribers, and on PHC’s YouTube Channel. Here’s the link.

Thanks to member Ken Krawchuk for drawing our attention to it.

Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics has just published an interview that Lila Azam Zanganeh conducted with John Updike “four years ago.” Here’s the link, with thanks to Dr. C. Greenhalgh for drawing our attention to it.

Member Jack Ruttle passed on the information that not just John Updike’s 1968 interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, but all of the interviews that The Paris Review published with writers are available online now, free.

Here’s the link.

Greta Cuyler of the Reading Eagle wrote a nice article about David Updike’s talk at Alvernia University on Tuesday, October 12. Here’s the link.

Meanwhile, Society member Joan Youngerman, who was one of Updike’s Class of 1950 Shillington H.S. classmates, announced Tuesday that she was donating her personal correspondence from John Updike to The John Updike Society Archive at Alvernia. That’s a real treasure trove, and the Society and Alvernia are grateful for the donation.

Earlier in the week, Peter Brown, who lives in Washington, D.C. and teaches fiction writing at The Writer’s Center, contacted the Society to say he will donate two Updike artifacts to the archive, framed magazines featuring Updike on the cover: a 1968 Time and a 1970 Esquire. They will make great additions to the room in which the archives will be housed, and we thank Peter as well.

The Los Angeles Times has published an article about “John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s deportation battle; The couple had powerful friends who helped them fight and win their deportation battle with the Nixon administration.”

One of those “friends” was John Updike, who, with fellow writer Joyce Carol Oates, sent a letter in support of Lennon and Ono. Writer and UC-Irvine professor of history Jon Wiener, who used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the information, has created a website on which he includes a photocopy of the Updike postcard written on their behalf. Wiener tells the whole story in his book, Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files, and the material is also the subject of a documentary, “The U.S. Versus John Lennon.”

It was announced at the conference in Reading and printed in the program that the Society board unanimously voted to give James Yerkes the first Distinguished Service Award. Today, Jim received his award, presented to him by Rich Boulet, director of the Blue Hill Public Library, a literary center in Maine near Yerkes’ home.

“Please express my sincere thanks to members of the Society,” Jim wrote in an email.

Yerkes, Professor of Religion and Philosophy Emeritus and former Provost of Moravian College, was honored for his extensive contributions to Updike scholarship, especially through The Centaurian, which he published from 1996 until it was forced to shut down in 2008.  Yerkes is also well known among Updike scholars for editing John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace, published by Eerdmans in December of 1999. Updike wrote him afterwards that “I think you got it just right,” and The John Updike Society thanks Jim Yerkes for his many years of service to Updike scholarship and congratulates him on his award. The presentation was reported by the local press, and library director Boulet was kind enough to send a PDF of an article that also appeared in The Ellsworth American: Ellsworth American story

According to Curator of Art and Civilization Scott Schweigert, it’s been three years since the Reading Public Museum has displayed the fountain that made a lasting impression on a young John Updike. “Drinking Girl” (by Edward McCartan) was still in storage during the Society conference in Reading, but members within driving distance will be pleased to learn that this fountain sculpture, which Updike describes in detail in Just Looking (1989), will be on display from October 9, 2010 through January 23, 2011. Schweigert said that because “it’s period,” the bronze girl that captivated young Updike will be displayed as part of the “Tiffany Lamps: Articles of Utility, Objects of Art” exhibit. Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays. They are closed on Mondays. Admission is $8.00. Be warned that though the mummy that affected Updike and the dioramas he described can still be seen, none of the small nude statues that fascinated him are on display.