Members have grown used to seeing posts from The Other John Updike Archive, a treasure trove of lost-and-found paper objects related to all facets of Updike’s life. Now it seems there’s an Other John Updike Society—or at least another incarnation of one.
New member Norm Carlson, who retired in 2001 as an Associate Professor of English at Western Michigan University, writes in his letter asking to join, “Actually, what I’ll sort of be doing—in military-speak—is ‘re-upping,’ since I was a member of the original John Updike Society back in the 1970s.
“That organization, in my memory, was more-or-less owned and operated by Joyce Markle, whose Fighters and Lovers (1973) was one of the earliest scholarly books about Updike’s work. She produced a mimeographed newsletter and arranged for annual John Updike Society sessions at MLA meetings.”
Longtime Updike scholar Don Greiner had no knowledge of this previous Updike Society, so we asked search-engine wizards David Lull and Larry Randen—Jim Yerkes’ editorial team for The Centaurian, who are now diligently finding Updike-related news for the Society website and Facebook page—to see what they could find out.
They came up with two relevant bios from John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by David Thorburn and Howard Eiland (Prentice-Hall, 1979), the first critical anthology devoted to Updike’s work:
“Dean Doner is academic vice-president of Boston University and a writer of stories and criticism. He edits the newsletter of the John Updike Society.”
“Joyce Markle has taught English at Loyola University. A founder of the John Updike Society, she was a consultant in the filming of Updike’s story ‘The Music School,’ which was televised nationally by the Public Broadcasting System in 1977.”
So there you have it: the first artifacts of The John Updike Society’s early history. Hopefully more information will surface. Pictured is the hard-to-find dust jacket from Fighters and Lovers, featuring artwork by Markle’s sister, Susan Bonners, an American Book Award-winning illustrator.
