John Updike Society member Christopher Love, who directs American Writers in France study-abroad for The University of Alabama, said that he will teach Updike as one of the mid-20th century writers who resided in or traveled in France—a course he said will include James Baldwin and Jack Kerouac.
Two stories that Love plans on teaching are “Museums and Women” and “Avec La Bebe-Sitter,” but he is asking members who have advice on additional stories or have useful knowledge about connections between Updike and France, French writers, French art, etc., to email him (cslove@ua.edu). Since many society members tend to like Hemingway as well, Love added that his new non-fiction book, Crimson Code: The Price of Success, will launch at an April 27 event at a Tuscaloosa, Ala. bookstore named Ernest and Hadley.
Friday, May 24, 11:30 a.m.-12:50 p.m. Session 10-M “Revisiting Olinger Stories(1964) at 60 and The Afterlife(1994) at 30: A Roundtable” (Salon 6)
Moderator: Sylvie Mathé, Aix-Marseille University, France
Peter Bailey, St. Lawrence University, NY
Biljana Dojčinović, University of Belgrade, Serbia
Nemanja Glintić, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China
James Plath, Illinois Wesleyan University
Matthew Shipe, Washington University in St. Louis, MO
Saturday, May 25, 8:30-9:50 a.m. Session 16-J “The Witches of Eastwick: novel (John Updike, 1984) v. film (George Miller, 1987): A Roundtable” (Salon 7)
Moderator: Adam Sexton, Yale University
Edward Allen, University of South Dakota
Carla Alexandra Ferreira, Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil
Olga Karasik-Updike, Independent Scholar, Newbury, MA
The selection committee for the John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship has chosen Dr. Sue Norton, Lecturer of English in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Technological University Dublin, to serve as the first fellow in residence.
The Fellowship, which will be offered annually by The John Updike Society, consists of a $1000 honorarium and a two-week residency at the Mission Hill Casitas within the Skyline Country Club in Tucson, Arizona. Updike owned and wrote from the Casitas during a part of each year between 2004 and 2009. Located in the Catalina Foothills with a spectacular view of Tucson, the Casitas (pictured below) are owned by Jan and Jim Emery, who generously donated the two-week stay.
Robert M. Luscher, who oversaw the selection process, said the committee chose Norton because of the important contributions that her proposed projects make to Updike studies. During her residency, Norton will work on a critical essay (tentatively titled “Somewhere Between Feminism and Misogyny: Classic Updike on the Modern Syllabus”) and make initial progress on the proposal for an edited collection of essays to celebrate the centenary of Updike’s birth—a volume encouraged by the literary editor at Bloomsbury Publishing.
Norton, whose work has appeared in The Journal of Scholarly Publishing, The Explicator, The Irish Journal of American Studies, The John Updike Review, and other books and journals, previously co-edited two volumes of essays with JUS member Laurence W. Mazzeno: Contemporary American Fiction in the European Clasroom: Teaching and Texts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and European Perspectives on John Updike (Camden House, 2018). Norton came to Updike studies through her doctoral work on family in contemporary American fiction, which she completed in 2001 at University College Dublin. Her first article on Updike (The John Updike Review, 2014) was on the “regulating daughter” in the Rabbit novels. She has maintained an interest in the treatment of girls and women in Updike’s writing and beyond. It is on this topic that she will focus during her residency as the 2024 Fellow at the Tucson Casitas.
John Updike was one of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. He was also among just a handful of Americans to be awarded both the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal, which are presented in White House ceremonies. He is widely know for his Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, which fellow writer Ian McEwan said was his choice for Great American Novel. Updike also wrote poems, and many of the poems published in his final volume, Endpoint, were written at the Casitas.
Writer-scholar residencies in the U.S. are highly competitive and prestigious. Details on the 2025 fellowship and other grants offered by The John Updike Society can be found here.
Every two years, The John Updike Society holds a conference at a site with an Updike connection to celebrate the literature and legacy of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. For every conference, the society awards competitive Schiff Travel Grants to scholars to enable them to attend the conference and share their work on Updike. The grants are made possible by a generous donation from The Robert and Adele Schiff Family Foundation. Under-40 recipients receive $1500, while the award for Member recipients is $1000. This year’s six awardees are the most diverse that the society has sponsored to date:
Townes Fricke (U.S., under 40) is a high school senior who is applying to colleges and already looking ahead to graduate school, where he hopes to focus on how literary biography affects our cultural perceptions of writers. A writer himself, he wishes to become an academic “without being pretentious about it.” Fricke also will be a speaker at the upcoming Roth @ 90 conference and is currently working on an essay collection on the history of the “Great American Novel.” At the Updike conference in Tucson he will present his paper on “Growth is Betrayal: John Updike’s Work through the Lens of His Peers.” The title is taken from a line in Rabbit Redux, and the peers that Fricke will focus on are John Cheever, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer.
Nemanja Glintić (China, under 40) is an assistant professor of Serbian language and literature at the Faculty of European Languages and Cultures of the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in Guangzhou, China. Currently he is a Ph.D. candidate whose dissertation focuses on the family novels of Updike and Serbian writer Danilo Kiš—two authors he deeply admires. Updike and Kiš met in Belgrade in 1978, and Kiš was the only Yugoxlav writer Updike read and publicly spoke about. The paper Glintić will present at the conference, “The Nascent Artists: John Updike’s Peter Caldwell and Danilo Kiš’ Andreas Sam,”comparatively analyzes Updike’s protagonist from The Centaur and a character from two books from Kiš’ family trilogy, The Family Circus—the novel Garden, Ashes and the short story collection Early Sorrows.
Biljana Dojčinović (Serbia, member) is a full professor at the Department for Comparative Literature and Theory of Literature, Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade. She has been a member of The John Updike Society since its founding and a member of The John Updike Review editorial board since its inception. A board member since 2014. Dojčinović directed the 5th Biennial John Updike Society Conference (2018) in Belgrade—the first JUS Conference outside U.S. Dojčinović has published seven academic books, among them the first and so far only monograph on Updike in Serbian, Cartographer of the Modern World (2007), as well as numerous articles on Updike, in both Serbian and English. In the paper she will present in Arizona, “Dedalus and Caldwell: Joyce in Updike’s The Centaur,” Dojčinović argues that the Joyce influence in The Centaur extended beyond Ulysses.
Carla Alexandra Ferreira (Brazil, member) is Associate Professor of American Literature at the Federal University of Sao Carlos. In 2014 she taught at the University of Iowa as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar and later earned a Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina under the supervision of Updike scholar Don Greiner. She is the author of North and South Readings: perceptions of oneself and the Other in Updike’s Work (2018) and various articles and book chapters on Updike and other writers from the U.S. and U.K. She has also advised theses and dissertations on Updike and American authors and has been a member of the society since 2014. More recently she has been working on a book about Updike’s New Yorker fiction and has an essay forthcoming in The John Updike Review. In Tucson she will present a paper on “Brazilians on Brazil (1994): the novel’s reception in the South American Country,” in which she explains why Brazilians reacted as they did and what critics could not see when they first read Updike’s novel.
Sue Norton (Ireland, member) is a lecturer of English in Technological University Dublin. With Laurence W. Mazzeno she co-edited and contributed to Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom: Teaching and Texts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and European Perspectives on John Updike (Camden House, 2018). Her work on writing and literature has appeared in Critical Insights; The Journal of Scholarly Publishing; The Explicator; The Irish Journal of American Studies; and The John Updike Review. She has presented papers on John Updike’s work at several John Updike Society conferences and at two American Literature Association conferences. The paper she will present in Tucson is “Pruning the Self and Asserting Identity in ‘A Desert Encounter,” in which she posits that Updike’s multifaceted authorial presence—celebrated American author and affable American retiree—works to assert individual identity, a positing of authorial presence as a kind of retort to Roland Barthe’s idea of the writer as mere scripter, devoid of true essence.”
Pradipta Sengupta (India, member) is an associate professor of English at M.U.C.Women’s College, Burdwan, West Bengal. He wrote his Ph.D. on “The ‘Hawthorne Novels’ of John Updike” at the University of Burdwan and also completed a postdoctoral project on “Recasting Contemporary America: A Study of John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy” while a research fellow at Osmania University Center for International Programs, Hyderabad. Since then he has published on Keats, Hawthorne, Tagore, Dickens, Frost, Carey, Heller, Yeats, Emerson, and Updike, with his main areas of interest continuing to be American fiction and Indian poetics. In Tucson he will present “Yoga and Tantric Love: Inadequacy and Futility in Updike’s S.” Set against the backdrop of Arizona desert, S. details the activities of a Hindu ashram and its sham hypocritical guru, the Arhat, who expoits and uses the idiom of both Patanjali Yoga and Tantric Love to indulge in his carnal exploits wth ashram women. A close reading suggests that Updike himself abuses the principles of Pantanjali Yoga and Tantric Love, to the detriment of the novel.
James Plath, known in Updike circles as president of The John Updike Society and the editor of two volumes of Updike interviews, was named one of 11 Quarry Farm Fellows for 2023. He will receive $1000 and spend two weeks in the fall living alone at the main house at Quarry Farm, where he will conduct research and work on a comparative essay. As part of the process, every applicant needed a “sponsor,” and Donald J. Greiner, Carolina Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus a the University of South Carolina, wrote in support of Plath’s proposal.
Plath described the essence of his project for the Quarry Farm Fellows website: “In 2002, Updike wrote the foreword to the Hesperus Press publication of The Diary of Adam and Eve, and what he said about Twain reveals much about himself and a connection with Twain that has yet to be explored—not so much as a literary influence as it is a literary kinship, a connection with a past literary figure who modeled attitudes and behaviors that spoke to Updike generations later. Updike notes that Eve’s Diary ‘makes a bold foray into female sexuality,’ and Twain seems to have been an inspiration for Updike in trying to write about female sexuality, as the latter does to a much greater extent in so many of his novels.
“Twain also modeled a successful writer who could straddle the popular and literary worlds, who could ‘sin boldly’ in his unabashed writing, who could have it both ways and write for profit and for literary posterity, and who not only embraced but relished the role of writer as spokesperson for American literature, culture, and social behaviors. Just as Hemingway noted a generation earlier that Twain’s public persona was key to the promotion of his writing, Updike too became conscious of Updike the writer as being a ‘character’ he would play in the public sphere. Such is the widespread influence of Twain that has yet to be documented in Updike studies—something that will be rectified as a result of this Quarry Farm Fellowship.”
Quarry Farm, which overlooks Elmira, New York, was owned by Mark Twain’s sister-in-law, Susan Langdon Crane. Twain and his wife spent 20 summers living at Quarry Farm, where all three of their daughters were born and where he composed many of his books, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). A year or so after Twain and Olivia’s first summer there, their hosts constructed a separate study built apart from the main house, allegedly so Twain would have a quiet place to write, but ostensibly because Mrs. Crane did not want him smoking cigars in his house while he worked.
“A smoke-free house is good,” joked Plath, who at one point was compiling a Conversations with Mark Twain volume for the University Press of Mississippi when another book of interviews rendered the project superfluous.
“I’m excited to work on this project partly because it feels like I’m taking up old business, and partly because the house isn’t open to the general public—only research fellows,” Plath said. “I love the idea of living and working where one of the great American writers lived and wrote.”
At the 6th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Reading and Shillington, Pa., four members were surprised with awards in appreciation for their longtime service.
The board members for this 501c3 nonprofit organization voted unanimously to honor David W. Ruoff and Dave Silcox for their invaluable service. Society members often remarked about the “two Daves” that do so much for The John Updike Childhood Home, and with great enthusiasm and energy, so the awards were “a no brainer,” according to society president Jim Plath.
The first distinguished service award was presented back in 2010, and the sixth Distinguished Service Award was given to Ruoff at the Friday, Oct. 1, 2021 conference dinner. The plaque he received praised Ruoff for “extraordinary docent work and other services to The John Updike Childhood Home.” Plath told the audience that from Day 1, when Ruoff began renting the single-story annex to the house that was built by Dr. John Hunter for his practice, he has been giving tours of the house to people who emailed, phoned, or just knocked on his door. Instead of just admitting them in and showing them around, Ruoff would tell them stories of growing up on that same street and having Updike’s father for a teacher. Some he would drive to other Updike sites in Shillington . . . and even Plowville. And for international pilgrims on the Updike trail, Ruoff would often surprise them with local delicacies like ring bologna and Tom Sturgis pretzels—Updike’s favorite.
Numerous people over the years have made donations to the society based on their interaction with Ruoff, who makes no secret of his love for John Updike, the Updike house, and the society dedicated to preserving Updike’s legacy. Of the 1001 things he does for the society, perhaps most appreciated are the many times he’s had to go down to the house in the middle of the night to check to make sure everything was okay. The building has a sensitive alarm system that can be triggered by very little movement, and it sometimes requires someone to interact with police. Ruoff has done all of that and more for too many years to count, Plath said.
The other “Dave” honored with a Distinguished Service Award—Dave Silcox—has an even longer history with the society. In fact, the details of launching the society were “hatched” in his dining room when he hosted Plath, Jim Schiff, and Jack De Bellis after they all spoke at a Reading Library tribute to John Updike. Silcox, who was Updike’s Shillington contact for roughly 10 years, helped Updike with all things, large and small. He’s done the same for the society, including recommending the right people for the right jobs. But perhaps his greatest contribution comes as a result of his being an avid collector. Silcox has been instrumental in developing the museum’s collection of artifacts and letters, acting as a go-between in many cases. Many of the exhibits currently on display would not have been possible without him. Silcox couldn’t attend the dinner, but Plath presented him his plaque at his Shillington home.
The surprises continued on Saturday night, when Michael Updike and Updike Society board members Sylvie Mathé, Biljana Dojčinović, and Marshall Boswell announced that they had a presentation to make. They told people in attendance that they wanted to recognize the “two Jims” that have done so much to move the society forward: President Jim Plath, for his work coordinating the house restoration and creation of a museum, and Vice-President Jim Schiff, for ten years of service through his editorship of The John Updike Review and the role that he played in securing support from his family foundation to purchase and fund the house.
The awards were framed, commissioned chalkboard slate carvings from sculptor Michael Updike, whose works both Jims have long admired. Plath appropriately received a carving of the Updike house, under which is an Updike quote, taken from the last line of “Grandparenting,” the final story in The Maples Stories: “Nobody belongs to us, except in memory.”
Schiff, who had been tapped by the Updike Literary Trust to edit a volume of selected letters, has spent the past five years elbow-deep in letters. For him, Michael Updike carved a letter slot with letters coming through it, featuring another Updike quote: “Once each day this broad mouth spews Love letters, bills, ads, pleas, and news.”
It doesn’t add so much as a penny to your Amazon order total, and the website is identical. But if you bookmark https://smile.amazon.com and shop there instead of amazon.com, you can choose a charity to benefit . . . and we hope you’ll decide to support John Updike Society and our continued efforts to create a world-class literary site and museum in The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa. This is not a gimmick, and you do not end up on someone’s mailing list. It’s the same shopping experience as shopping through the regular Amazon site.
So far the JUS society president (“you” below) has accounted for more than half of the donations that were direct-deposited into the society’s bank account from Amazon Smile. Come on Updike fans and book lovers, we can do better!
John Updike Society president Jim Plath reports that he earned $10.70 for the society just by listing The John Updike Society as the charitable beneficiary on his account. He spent no more money, and did nothing special after the initial sign-up. All he did was bookmark Amazon Smile and the site automatically credited The John Updike Society for any purchases made. $10.70 might not sound like a lot, but if all of the 300 members shopped via Amazon Smile? It adds up. Go to https://smile.amazon.com to get started….
After holding conferences in Reading, Pa. (2010, 2014), Boston, Mass. (2012), and Columbia, S.C. (2016), The John Updike Society will travel abroad for the first time in in its brief history during the first week of June 2018. The 5th Biennial John Updike Society Conference will be hosted by the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade, in Serbia.
That may pose an economic hardship for some scholars, but relief is available through Schiff Travel Grants.
Thanks to a generous donation from The Robert and Adele Schiff Family Foundation, the society will award up to four $1500 travel-to-conference grants for scholars under 40 to be able to attend the Serbia conference. Applicants need not be members at the time, but must join before grants can be paid.
In addition, up to three $1000 travel-to-conference grants will be awarded to society members needing assistance to be able to participate in the conference.
Both grants are merit- and need-based, and interested scholars should apply by November 30, 2017.
To apply, send a one-page proposal for a 15- to 20-minute paper appropriate for the conference, along with one paragraph about yourself, what grant you are applying for, and why the grant is important to you, to society president James Plath (jplath@iwu.edu). The selection committee will make their decisions and announce successful applicants by the end of the first week of December 2017.
For half of its 13-year run, The Centaurian counted on Dave Lull to scour the Internet for Updike-related news so that editor James Yerkes could keep the site interesting and useful for scholars and the just-plain-readers Updike most appreciated. Then, two years after a server problem forced that site to close in 2009, Lull, a librarian in charge of technical services at the Duluth Public Library in Duluth, Minn., began doing the same thing for The John Updike Society website. Over the years he’s provided editor James Plath with the material to post more than 700 articles, both popular and academic—fitting, since over the course of his 39-year career as a librarian Lull has worked in both academic and popular libraries, in both reference and technical services.
Lull retired from library work in 2015, but not from Updike studies. “He sends me so many Updike-related stories and articles that it’s hard for me to keep up,” Plath said—something he shares in common with Yerkes, who could never manage to publish all of the items that Lull located. “I fall behind, and then go through my emails to play catch-up,” Plath said. “But I can’t imagine trying to maintain a society website/blog without Dave’s help. He has really enriched our society’s site.”
Because of all that Lull has done for Updike studies and for all he continues to do, the board of directors of The John Updike Society unanimously approved him to receive the society’s Distinguished Service Award.
Yerkes never had the pleasure of meeting Lull, who lives in Superior, Wis. across the bay from Duluth, but because Plath was going to be in Saint Paul for an F. Scott Fitzgerald conference he suggested meeting halfway in Hinckley, Minn. Appropriately, they gathered at the Hinckley Public Library, where one of the librarians offered to take a photo of the presentation.
“When I walked in, Dave was already there and I asked him if the library had any Updike books,” Plath said. “Of course, being both a librarian and an Updike fan, Dave had already checked. ‘Only one book,’ he said. ‘The Maples Stories.'”
Lull’s academic background is in political science (mainly political philosophy) and philosophy, and he received a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Superior in 1970. Then he earned a Master’s in Library Science from Rosary College (now Dominican University) in 1976 after a four-year stint in the Navy. “I have wide-ranging interests with no areas of expertise, so librarianship has been a good fit for me,” Lull said. “I do have a special interest in writing and writers, though I’m not a writer.”
In presenting the award on behalf of the society, Plath noted that it was awarded “with gratitude to Dave Lull, for his many years helping to promote John Updike’s legacy through The Centaurian and JUS website.”
“If you see an article on our website, odds are it’s from Dave,” Plath said.
“I’m delighted to know that I’ve been of service,” Lull said.
This is the fifth Distinguished Service Award the society has presented in its nine years of existence, with the first one going to Yerkes back in 2010.
Two stories that Love plans on teaching are “Museums and Women” and “Avec La Bebe-Sitter,” but he is asking members who have advice on additional stories or have useful knowledge about connections between Updike and France, French writers, French art, etc., to email him (cslove@ua.edu). Since many society members tend to like Hemingway as well, Love added that his new non-fiction book, Crimson Code: The Price of Success, will launch at an April 27 event at a Tuscaloosa, Ala. bookstore named Ernest and Hadley.
Chicago’s Palmer House will welcome back the 
The selection committee for the John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship has chosen Dr. Sue Norton, Lecturer of English in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Technological University Dublin, to serve as the first fellow in residence.
Laurence W. Mazzeno: Contemporary American Fiction in the European Clasroom: Teaching and Texts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and European Perspectives on John Updike (Camden House, 2018). Norton came to Updike studies through her doctoral work on family in contemporary American fiction, which she completed in 2001 at University College Dublin. Her first article on Updike (The John Updike Review, 2014) was on the “regulating daughter” in the Rabbit novels. She has maintained an interest in the treatment of girls and women in Updike’s writing and beyond. It is on this topic that she will focus during her residency as the 2024 Fellow at the Tucson Casitas.
