Category Archives: Publications

The Other John Updike Archive focuses on objects

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UpdikebillPaul Moran writes,

“The Other John Updike Archive is a collection of objects that formerly belonged to John Updike.

“Each posting will contain another piece from the collection.

“This is part of the Kula Art Project, which consists of a return to the importance of relics and the biography of ordinary things.”

Some of the things are actually quite extraordinary, such as a royalty statement from Knopf showing domestic and foreign sales for Rabbit, Run. Or a hotel bill detailing what room the Updikes stayed in.

Garrison Keillor reads Updike’s “Baseball”

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Citi FieldThe Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, June 25, 2013, featured Updike’s poem “Baseball,” which seems even more appropriate to share as Tuesday’s All-Star Game  draws nearer.

In fact, it’s tempting to contact starting NL first basemen Joey Votto to ask him how accurate Updike’s second-stanza simile seems—if he was ever “scared / of the shortstop’s wild throw / that stretches you out like a gutted deer.”

“Baseball” appeared in Endpoint, confirming Updike’s sustained interest in the Great American Pastime throughout his life.

Updike scholarship gets a boost with the release of “The Collected Stories”

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UpdikestoriescoverAs much as Adam Begley’s forthcoming biography, Updike enthusiasts have been anticipating the September 12 publication of John Updike: The Collected Stories by the Library of America. The two volumes can be bought singly (John Updike: Collected Early Stories, John Updike: Collected Later Stories) or in a set that includes a sturdy and colorful slipcase designed by Chip Kidd, featuring the 1982 oil-on-canvas portrait by Alex Katz that’s housed at the National Portrait Gallery.

I received an advance copy of the set and am happy to report that it’s extremely well done. Christopher Carduff, who put together the special book publication of Hub Fan Bids Kid Adieu and edited Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism (2011) and Always Looking: Essays on Art (2012), has arranged the stories in the order of their composition—a task made easier, Carduff writes, because “Updike signed a first-reading agreement” with The New Yorker when he was 22 years old and “habitually marked the date of submission on the first page of the typescript copy he kept for his files.” Almost all these typescripts from Updike’s personal files are now in the collection of Harvard’s Houghton Library.   Continue reading →

New Republic spotlights Updike’s 1960 defense of Kim Novak

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Screen Shot 2013-05-21 at 7.59.27 AMThe May 27, 2013 issue of The NewRepublic spotlights “John Updike: On Knocking Miss Novak” in “From the Stacks.”

The feature details a verbal scuffle Updike had with New Republic film critic Stanley Kauffmann and includes a letter from Updike that was published in the July 25, 1960 issue, following Kauffmann’s review of Strangers when We Meet.

“I am so sick and tired of Stanley Kauffmann knocking Kim Novak. She is a terrific-looking woman,” Updike writes.

“Motion pictures are not, as Mr. Kauffmann seems to believe, transmogrified novels or adjusted plays; these two art-forms have as little to do with motion pictures as they do with each other.”

Updike ends his letter with a pretty good slap at Kauffmann: “He is not a bad critic, he is an inverted one; the opposite of everything he says is true.”

The New Republic on John Updike:
“Updike Remembered” (January 30, 2009)
“The READ: Ephemera, Run” (June 30, 2010)

 

Archivist finds record of early Updike award

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We’ve known that John Updike won awards as a young man for his creativity, but it’s nice to actually see tangible proof.

The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards celebrate 90 years of creativity this year as the nation’s longest-running opportunity for students to be recognized for their creative talents.

As their website says, alumni winners include Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, Sylvia Plath, Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates, Ken Burns, and Robert Redford. Now they can add the name of John Updike, whom archivist Haley Richardson (of the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, a non-profit associated with Scholastic) discovered in a yellowed publication announcing the 1948 winners. As you can see from the entry below, young Updike won $25 for a gag cartoon he submitted as a sophomore under the direction of his teacher, Carlton Boyer (whose name is misspelled).   Continue reading →

A footnote on Updike’s “A Mild Complaint” surfaces

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Updike’s short story “A Mild Complaint” appeared in Ian Frazier’s Humor Me: An Anthology of Funny Contemporary Writing (Plus Some Great Old Stuff, Too) (Ecco Press, 2010) with this footnote, which appears in the author’s introduction:

“Also, unconnected to anything, here’s a note, just FYI: The John Updike piece, “A Mild Complaint,” which concludes Part I, was famous at the New Yorker as the piece that the magazine held on to the longest before it was published. Updike wrote the piece, and the magazine bought it, in the mid-1950s, when he was a young man. For inscrutable reasons the New Yorker then kept the piece for twenty-some years and finally ran it in the 1970s [sic, actually April 19, 1982], when Updike was in his middle years. The piece is included here as a testament to the resilience of literature, and as a wave to Mr. Updike, wherever in the afterlife he may be” (xi-xii).

Frazier’s remarks can be found in context at this link. Thanks to member Larry Randen for passing it along.

Obit web magazine spotlights “Updike’s Dark Certainty”

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The online magazine Obit—whose tagline in “Death is only half the story. Obit is about life . . .”—featured John Updike on January 28, 2009. In “Updike’s Dark Certainty,” Robert Roper visits “Updike country—the region where suburban platting meets knicker-dropping” and offers an lyrical-interpretive summary of Updike’s literary life, along with a bottom-story link to several obits and appraisals of Updike.

The item comes to us belatedly from Dave Lull, via Larry Randen.

Updike prominently featured in NYRB article

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The current issue (July 12-August 15) of The New York Review of Books is devoted to fiction, and one article prominently features Updike, member Brian Duffy writes:

It is “American Male Novelists: The New Deal,” by Elaine Blair. Its starting point is David Foster Wallace’s labeling of Updike, Mailer and Roth as the “Great Male Narcissists,” and his claim that these novelists are much less appreciated by readers of later generations (especially by younger women readers). It then goes on to consider how contemporary male novelists are conscious of this legacy and how they seek to appeal to female readers by rejecting the attitudes and sexual “politics” of the “GMN.”
Here is the link to the first page of the article. You’ll need to subscribe to The New York Review of Books to get the full article, or else pick up a hard copy.