Category Archives: Updike in Context

Quote about creativity is traced back to Updike

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Quote Investigator, which tracks down the sources of quotes, was asked, “Exalted activities such as composing a symphony or devising an invention clearly enable the maker to express creativity. Refreshingly, the prominent writer John Updike contended that even quotidian activities allowed for creativity if the doer cared enough to excel. Would you please help me find a citation?”

The reply: “In 1968 Playboy magazine contacted several well-known writers and asked each one to compose a short piece about creativity. The group included John Updike, Arthur Miller, Le Roi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and James T. Farrell. Updike propounded an expansive notion of creativity” and Updike’s tracked-down quote is reproduced. “For one thing, creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity; the ditchdigger, dentist and artist go about their tasks in much the same way, and any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”

That December 1968 Playboy also included responses from Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg,  and William Styron in a round-up titled “Symposium on Creativity.”

Quote Investigator reports that Updike’s complete remarks written for that 1968 Playboy were reprinted in his 1975 non-fiction collection Picked-Up Pieces, which was then quoted by a Los Angeles Times book reviewer . . . “hence, the quotation received a wider circulation.”

Author: Updike anticipated the MAGA movement

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On July 3, 2026, Rashmee Roshan Lall mentioned Updike in This Week, Those Books, which aims to provide “in roughly five minutes, crucial context—from fiction and non-fiction—to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.” The “Big Story” this week was, of course, America’s 250th birthday. Of Updike, Lall writes,

“Considering America’s 250th birthday is supervised by President Donald Trump, it’s worth examining this novel by one of the country’s greatest 20th-century writers. This John Updike novel is a forerunner of MAGA nostalgia for a golden past set in the 1950s. It’s the second book in Updike’s quartet of novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Set in the late 1960s, we see a restless Harry. He has moved on from his schooldays as a basketball star of his small Pennsylvanian town of Brewer. Now, he is now a Linotype operator in a local factory. He has a teenage son, a cooling marriage and feels an increasing sense of irritation at the racial and cultural changes underway. He feels that the America he knew is slipping away. Harry is a nice chap in all sorts of ways, but it really does feel like he shares a lot with Trump’s angry, working-class base.”

Choice Quote (from Rabbit Redux): “It’s as if, all these Afro hair bushes and gold earrings and hoopy noise on buses, seeds of some tropical plant sneaked in by the birds were taking over the garden. His garden. Rabbit knows it’s his garden and that’s why he’s put a flag decal on the back window of the Falcon even though Janice says it’s corny and fascist. In the papers you read about these houses in Connecticut where the parents are away in the Bahamas and the kids come in and smash it up for a party. More and more this country is getting like that. As if it just grew here instead of people laying down their lives to build it.”

Read the whole post.

UK Times names ‘Rabbit, Run’ one of America’s Top 25 works of literature

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The Times (UK) paid tribute to the United States of America’s 250th anniversary by asking critics to name “their favourite American films, books, TV shows, and more, from Star Wars to Campbell’s Soup.”

For the literature category, Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times chief literary critic for Culture & Books, selected John Updike’s Rabbit, Run as one of her 25 best—and that’s over the entire 250-year span of American literature. Here’s what she wrote:

Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)

In high school Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was a basketball star. Now 26, he is trapped in the comfortable disappointments of postwar suburbia: a deadening sales job selling MagiPeelers, a marriage to an alcoholic and a nagging sense that life has passed him by. So Rabbit runs, gets lost and ends up returning to his home town to live with a former prostitute. What follows is one of the great American quests for freedom, rendered in prose of extraordinary beauty and precision. Updike brings to ordinary lives the attentiveness once reserved for kings and heroes, finding poetry, desire and spiritual yearning in every detail. He can make the mundane shimmer. The first in a tetralogy chronicling Rabbit’s life across four decades, this begins an unrivalled portrait of postwar America, turning the life of a drifting former basketball star into one of the defining stories of the 20th century.

Updike, whose father once walked a Fourth of July parade dressed as Uncle Sam, as did his hero, Rabbit, this latest honor would have been icing on the USA 250th anniversary cake.

Author talks about Ipswich, Updike, and her ‘Couples’-inspired novel

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Jenny Jackson is vice president and editorial director of fiction at Alfred A. Knopf, but that’s not her only connection to John Updike. As she wrote in a June 30, 2026 piece in Book Riot, “I grew up in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a seaside town north of Boston famous for three things: beer, clams, and John Updike.

“The celebrated author wrote his biggest books, including the Rabbit novels, while living on East Street, a few blocks from my house. Ipswich is a small town, and Updike was very much a celebrity in the midst, winning every major literary prize, appearing on the cover of Life magazine, and regularly contributing to the New Yorker.

“But he wasn’t a reclusive star; instead, he was enmeshed in the social fabric of the town, playing volleyball with a big gang of friends, parenting his small children alongside a dozen other couples, and conducting messy extramarital affairs with a few of them.”

Jackson said The Shampoo Effect was inspired by Couples and, in fact, asks the question, What would Updike’s steamy 1968 novel be like if it were published today, gossip in an era of cell phones and social media? Read the entire article.

Jackson also wrote a piece for Literary Hub (“Jenny Jackson on the Literary Potential of Gossip”) in which she identified a second , “The second inspiration for The Shampoo Effect came from a less literary (but equally Massachusetts) fixation. In 2007, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady famously had a baby with the actress Bridget Moynahan while dating the supermodel Gisele Bundchen. Brady and Bridget Moynahan were no longer together, and he was with Gisele by the time Bridget realized she was pregnant. It was a tabloid sensation, a love triangle that paid salaries across Us Weekly and Page Six. So, these two gossipy scandals tangled together in my mind to become a novel.” Read the entire article.

Original Magazines places Updike at the forefront of generational change

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In “From Bedtime Stories to Cultural Struggles: Updike’s Domestic Lens,” Original Magazines examines an Updike short story that appeared in The New Yorker, “Should Wizard Hit Mommy?”

The article called Updike’s literary snapshot of a bedtime ritual happening all across America “The Suburban Calm Before the Storm” and “The Story That Keeps Asking Questions.”

“The New Yorker had evolved far beyond its origins as a humor magazine. By the late 1950s, it had become the most prestigious launchpad in American letters—a place where fiction wasn’t decoration but dissection. J.D. Salinger had already used its pages to expose the phoniness beneath polite society. Philip Roth was sharpening his knives. And Updike, still a rising voice, had chosen the most intimate battlefield imaginable: the space between a parent’s authority and a child’s emerging autonomy.

“The magazine knew what it was doing. Sophistication and subversion, wrapped in the same elegant package.”

The article continued, “In Updike’s story, Jack—the father—spins nightly tales for his daughter Jo. The ritual should be simple: father narrates, child listens, sleep follows. But Jo has developed opinions. When Jack’s story about Roger Skunk ends with the creature’s mother insisting he keep his foul smell rather than the roses the wizard gave him, Jo rebels. She wants the wizard to hit the mother. She wants the ending rewritten.

“Jack refuses.

“What follows isn’t violence or melodrama—it’s something more unsettling. A quiet standoff between generations, between the way things have always been done and the way a child thinks they should be. The bedtime story becomes a referendum on authority itself.

“Updike wasn’t writing about skunks and wizards. He was writing about 1959 America, where the next generation was beginning to ask a question their parents found uncomfortable: Why must it be this way?”

The article concluded, “The June 13, 1959 New Yorker didn’t just publish a story about parental authority—it marked the beginning of that authority’s long, slow erosion. Updike’s ‘Should Wizard Hit Mommy?’ remains uncomfortable precisely because it refuses resolution. Jo’s question hangs in the air, unanswered.

“Should the wizard have hit the mommy? Should children obey without understanding? Should tradition survive simply because it’s tradition?

“In 1959, these were bedtime story questions. By 1969, they were revolution.”

Read the whole article.

 

Roger’s Version leaves blogger with mixed feelings

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Thomas Bevilacqua, a Ph.D. who teaches high school English at The Maclay School in Florida, recently posted his reaction to John Updike’s Roger’s Version on his Substack blog:

“It’s pretty clear to me why Roger’s Version is frequently pointed to as one of Updike’s best novels. You see some of the recurring themes from the Rabbit novels—sex, theology, relationships, America—but it’s presented in a more direct or less ponderous way. The two Rabbit novels I’ve read (Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux) are a bit more ground in their historical moment . . . while Roger’s Version is a bit removed from that, though it is obviously and quite pointedly set in the Reagan moment,” Bevilacqua wrote.

The problem, for Bevilacqua, was Updike’s “engagement with, well, sex, to put it bluntly. I don’t think I’m terribly prudish when it comes to what I can read, but I always find how Updike writes about these things to be somewhat strange. Perhaps because they feel so alien relative to everything else he’s writing while someone like Philip Roth makes it feel more central. . . . The entanglements of Roger and Verna as well as Dale and Esther feel shocking, not just because of what is being depicted or considered by how it feels . . . dropped in. I don’t think Updike puts these things in just to shock us, but it feels that way and it drags me as a reader out of the narrative he’s crafted.”

Bevilacqua concluded, “Roger’s Version fits very much in my experience of Updike’s writing—both engrossing but also frustrating, and yet I feel compelled to read more.”

If that compulsion holds, perhaps Bevilacqua might try the other two novels in Updike’s Scarlet Letter trilogy, in which Updike updated and retold Hawthorne’s story of an adulterous triangle from perspective of each of the main characters, starting with the Dimmesdale character (A Month of Sundays, 1975) and ending with the Hester character (S., 1988), with the voyeuristic Roger’s Version falling in the middle (1986).

Brattleboro Literary Festival spends an hour with Michael Updike and James Schiff

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Since the Selected Letters of John Updike was published in October 2025, there have been dozens of interviews with the volume’s editor, James Schiff, and with Michael Updike, the family’s representative on the John Updike Literary Trust, who also has been doing readings and talks to promote the book.

If you only have time to listen to one of the interviews, this hour-long free-flowing conversation might be the one. For this interview, Michael is assisted by his wife, Olga Karasik-Updike, a Philip Roth and John Updike scholar. Even John Updike Society members who have known Schiff and Updike for decades will hear things for the first time. It’s an engaging, insightful  show billed as “A Literary Cocktail Hour,” recorded on May 13, 2026 and hosted by Jenny Altshuler. Here’s the link.

Updike’s ‘Rabbit Redux’ makes list of books ‘That Capture This American Moment’

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Time magazine asked “25 literary luminaries to pick one book that they believe reflects where American life is headed or speaks to the present in a meaningful way. Their answers bring together poetry, nonfiction, and fiction from across the nation’s history and beyond its borders . . . . a reading list to match this moment.”

Ron Chernow, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his biography Washington: A Life and recently published a biography of Mark Twain, picked the second volume in John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, Rabbit Redux:

“Amid the upheaval of the Trump years, the postwar novel that strikes me as most prophetic is the second book in John Updike’s extraordinary quartet of novels about Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom. An erstwhile high school basketball star in the fictional town of Brewer, Pa., Harry deplores his job as a Linotype operator, which feels like a sad anticlimax after his schoolyard heroics. Once solid and prosperous, his red-brick, blue-collar town now seems seedy and abandoned and he yearns for the supposed simplicity of the 1950s. As a white male who inhabited a once homogeneous town, Harry feels marooned, marginalized by the social and racial turmoil of the late 1960s. A young Connecticut runaway, Jill, and a drug-dealing Black hustler, Skeeter, camp out in his house with explosive results. As they try to educate him about race, slavery, and welfare, Harry feels embittered that the America he has known is slipping away. He has his redeeming qualities, to be sure, but it is hard not to see the embattled Harry as an early forerunner of President Trump’s angry, working-class base.”

Writer Ian McEwan and actor Cillian Murphy have called Updike’s collective Rabbit novels their choice for Great American Novel.

“25 Books That Capture This American Moment,” posted May 12, 2026

Tweeter says Updike invented The Elaine

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Christopher J. Scalia tweeted that “John Updike invented The Elaine.” As Exhibit A he offered this description from Updike’s short story “The Happiest I’ve Been” (The New Yorker, Dec. 27, 1958):

“There being no answer to Neil, I went into the living room, where Margaret, insanely drunk, was throwing herself around as if wanting to break a bone. Somewhat in time to the music she would run a few steps, then snap her body like a whip, her chin striking her chest and her hands flying backward, fingers fanned, as her shoulders pitched forward.”

Click here to see The Elaine (GIF) 

It’s not as far-fetched as it seems. After all, Seinfeld did tell The Washingtonian editor Jack Limpert in an interview that Updike’s hyper-detailed descriptions make him laugh “more than anything, that he would zero in on that.”

“Updike, to me, was insane,” Seinfeld said. “I love microscopic acuity and I thought he was untouchable in that: the fineness, and the smallness of things that he would describe so well. . . . I mean, the Updike stuff is funny to me. You know, describing the circles of water under someone’s toes when they get out of the pool. That makes me laugh more than anything, that he would zero in on that.” That’s why Seinfeld said he’d choose Updike for one of the three writers, dead or alive, that he’d invite to a dinner party.

 

 

 

 

Was Updike anti-semitic or just mean spirited?

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Those who attended the joint Updike and Roth societies conference in Greenwich Village in October 2025 found two groups that, like their namesakes, were friendly rivals . . . mostly friendly. Only one person had an obvious axe to grind, which made members of both societies uncomfortable. And that person just published a well-written, thought-provoking article in the Jewish Review of Books titled “Updike and the Jews.” Jesse Saich was reacting to Updike’s satirical Jewish alter-ego, Henry Bech, and the three volumes that allowed Updike to poke fun of the Jewish writers that he called the “chief glory” of postwar American fiction. Saich wondered,

“Why had Updike invented this de-Judaized Jew? ‘I find myself, in what should be an uncompetitive field, terribly jealous,’ Updike said in 1966. In a later interview, Updike was frank: All the attention paid to Jewish rivals annoyed him. ‘Out of that unease, I created Henry Bech to show that I was really a Jewish writer also.’ Reading the Bech stories, one senses another motive. ‘Your ideas are the product . . . of spite,’ a character tells Bech. ‘There is somebody you want to get even with.’ Bingo. Bech was a way of ‘working out various grudges,’ Updike confessed.”

But, as Saich admitted, “Even Updike’s detractors generally come around. ‘Long ago I wrote a nervous review of Bech for Commentary,’ Cynthia Ozick told Updike, offering apologies and congratulations (‘Mazel tov!’) on Updike’s Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, why not forgive? In every era, great writing springs from poisoned minds. Trollope disliked ‘low, disgusting Jews.’ Thackeray resented ‘sheenies.’ ‘What is bad about Jews is that they are not only conspicuous, but go out of their way to make themselves so.’ The author? None other than fair-minded George Orwell.

“A writer, Updike once said, is entitled to his bigotries. And so he was. Does that vitiate his art? Can we reject a novel’s morality but admire its beauty? I’ve always thought so, but now I’m not sure. On some level, reading entails submission to an author’s way of seeing. When we’re swept away, we become, for that moment, the author’s partner. In such complicity are the risks and rewards of great literature.”

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