Michael Updike to read Selected Letters at Ipswich museum
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Category Archives: Readings & Talks
RSVP now for a zoom course on Updike and Roth
The Library of America will offer a four-part zoom course on literary friends and rivals John Updike and Philip Roth, taught by Adam Gopnik, who delivered the opening keynote talk at the October 2025 joint Philip Roth and John Updike societies conference in New York City.
The sessions will be held weekly on Wednesday afternoons from 1:30-2:45, Jan. 14 through Feb. 4. The class will be recorded and shared with registrants so they can watch it any time.
“Inspired by the multivolume LOA editions of Roth and Updike, this course will delve into their complex relationship and many masterpieces, from early short-fiction triumphs, to the scandalous 1960s breakthroughs Portnoy’s Complaint and Couples, to brilliant late-career works like Roth’s American Trilogy and Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies that show these two literary lions confronting their legacies and making bold bids for artistic immortality.”
The course costs $200 and includes a coupon for 40 percent off all Roth and Updike volumes in the LOA series. Participation is limited, so RSVP now if interested.
Updike 2002 reading, remarks at Illinois Wesleyan University reveal insecurity
On February 11, 2002, John Updike was asked to deliver remarks to commemorate the opening of the Ames Library at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington. That Founders’ Day Convocation, now online, presents a view of Updike that would be repeated many times over: a much admired literary giant receiving, somewhat shyly and awkwardly, an honorary degree and delivering remarks that almost always included a reading of his own work.
On this occasion Updike read from a bound proof of his Collected Poems. But after a poem about a college appointment that “some august professor” had scheduled, then forgotten, Updike remarked, “I always had the feeling that I was somehow not, try as hard as I might, not quite pleasing to Harvard. I went there and was grateful and was stunned and I imbibed the New England magic and I met my future wife, and was president of the Harvard Lampoon, and got a good degree and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa, and yet I felt it all, in Harvard’s eyes, wasn’t quite enough. There was something un-Harvardian about me. . . . I was inexorably gauche in the eyes of Harvard.”
Updike received dozens of honorary degrees during his long writing career, but most of them seem to have vanished or were discarded, while others turned up for sale in independent bookstores—the going rate, according to a Houston Chronicle article, being $750. But the whereabouts of this particular degree is indeed known.
The tube Updike was handed containing his Illinois Wesleyan Degree is in the collection of The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa., and will soon be added to new displays in the upstairs room that was once his maternal grandparents’. The room’s theme: The Writer’s Life.