Category Archives: Updike in Context

Updike, Irwin Shaw, P.K. Dick, and Joan Maple?

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In a recent blog-post musing, Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University, talked about picking up a copy of the LOA two-volume set of Updike’s Collected Stories and reading “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” Which led him to recall a similarly titled story by Irwin Shaw, “Main Currents of American Thought,” which led him (come on, keep up!) to think that rather than having anything in common with Shaw, “Updike is similar to Philip K. Dick as a writer in that he takes the same few characters and recycles them through lots of similar situations.

“Dick has the pathetic lead character (‘Joe Chip’), the reliable older man (‘Runciter’), and the nagging wife (the sister in Confessions of a Crap Artist). Updike has the ‘Updike’ character (a student or young man in the early stories, then a young husband and father, then a divorcing middle-aged man, then a rueful man in late middle age, drifting among his own thoughts) along with various supporting characters.”

Which leads Gelman, finally, to, “I like lots of individual Updike stories but I’ve gotta say that the best are the Maples stories because these are the only ones where the woman character is as strong as the man. Joan gives as good as she gets.” Then back again to “The Varieties of Religious Experience.”

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Award-winning travel writer visits Updike’s childhood home

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“I had a special link to John Updike, the celebrated writer who died in 2009. I once served as his muse,” began William Ecenbarger, who has won 17 writing awards from the Society of American Travel Writers. His latest feature, “John Updike’s Muse,” was published on April 3, 2026 by In The Know Traveler.

“It happened in 1983 when I was a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and sought an interview with Updike, whose publisher informed me never gave interviews. But a chance encounter with Linda Updike, his mother, broke the ice, and I ended up spending a full day with the author; mostly we drove around his boyhood haunts in Pennsylvania that served as settings for so much of his fiction.

“Several months after the interview a short story appeared in the New Yorker titled, ‘One More Interview,’ by John Updike. In it the main character, a famous actor, drives around his hometown with a journalist. Many of the events, even verbatim dialogue, were taken exactly from the real interview between me and Updike.

“Over the next four decades, I would learn as an Updike fan that he consistently used his experiences and surroundings as wellsprings for his fiction. And thus I was not surprised this year when I visited the recently opened John Updike Childhood Museum in Shillington, Pennsylvania.”

His guide this time was James Plath, president of The John Updike Society, who took him through the house that left a lasting impression on Updike and now contains many of his treasures, small and large. Upstairs, for example, Updike’s “tiny bedroom has his toys and books, ranging from Dumbo to the Lone Ranger, and some of the clothing he wore as a toddler.

A bowl of marbles was found under the floor boards here. A childhood friend had no recollection of playing marbles and said he and John would use slingshots to shoot them out the bedroom window.”

Photos:  Loose floorboards in young Updike’s bedroom removed during renovation, and the marbles that had been carefully placed in a “nest” beneath them.

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Berks County remembers John Updike

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WFMZ, which covers the Lehigh Valley and Berks County, published a piece today by historian Frank Whelan on “History’s Headlines: John Updike of Berks County.” Like Adam Begley’s biography, it begins with a story about journalist William Ecenbarger following the Updike trail in order to write a feature. Whelan’s article recounts how Ecenbarger went to the local library to ask for suggestions and ideas, only to encounter “an elderly woman in tortoise shell glasses” who told him, “I know all about him . . . . He’s my son.”

Whelan notes how that meeting led to his driving around Berks County with the author’s mother and getting the kind of tour freelancers can only dream about . . . which in turn led to his actually getting to take the same drive with Updike, whom he let drive his Volkswagen Rabbit.

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Michael Updike reads his father’s letters at an Ipswich event

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Michael Updike has been touring to promote Selected Letters of John Updike—as his father would have done, were he still with us. Interest in Updike has remained high in Ipswich, where the Updike’s lived for many years and where he wrote in an office on the second floor of the Caldwell Building.

Those who introduced him at The Ipswich Museum remarked how they had never seen the room so crowded, and Michael shared their marvel—especially, he noted, since it was a cold Super Bowl Sunday.

Those in attendance, and those who watch will especially enjoy the commentaries provided by Michael—starting with an explanation for the “garish” bull and bear necktie he wore, explaining that his father was invited to ring the bell to start the trading and was gifted the tie on that occasion.

Here is the link to the video recording.

Updike podcast is up and running again

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Bob Batchelor’s podcast John Updike: American Writer, American Life is active again. The new episode is titled “Why You Should Be Reading John Updike: The; Writer Who Predicted Everything.”

From the site: “Hosted by cultural historian and Updike biographer Bob Batchelor, each episode is focused, sharp, and built for listeners who want to dive into the life and career of one of America’s greatest writers.

“Updike saw the death of American manufacturing. He wrote about economic anxiety before it became a political movement. He diagnosed the collapse of masculine identity before the culture had a vocabulary for it. He saw the 1970s energy crisis, not as a temporary inconvenience, but as a permanent reckoning with American assumptions about prosperity and progress. And he did it all in beautiful, lyrial sentences.

“He also wrote things that make contemporary readers uncomfortable. His male characters objectify and flee. His perspective is overwhelmingly white and suburban. This podcast doesn’t hide from those tensions. It engages them, because honest conversations about American literature require addressing human complexity, not running from it.

“Each episode takes one aspect of Updike’s life, work, or world and opens it up: the Pennsylvania mill town that shaped him, the New Yorker years that refined his voice, the feminist critique that shadowed his reputation, the beautiful and brutal sentences that remain his most enduring legacy. From the Rabbit novels to Couples to Terrorist—from Updike’s poetry to his art criticism—no corner of the work is off limits.”

Podcast explores Updike’s novel ‘The Coup’

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On “Ninety-Nine Novels: The Coup by John Updike,” Graham Foster explained, “In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess’s interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess’s list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.

“In this episode, Andrew Biswell talks to writer and critic Bob Batchelor about The Coup by John Updike, a novel Anthony Burgess called ‘a beautifully written disturbing lyric composition’. . . .

“Bob Batchelor has written 16 books on subjects as wide as The Great Gatsby, Jim Morrison and the Doors, the Prohibition, and comic book writer Stan Lee. He has written extensively about John Updike, including the book John Updike: A Critical Biography. He has also presented the podcast series John Updike: American Writer, American Life. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Media, and Culture at Coastal Carolina University.”

Booker winner David Szalay credits Amis and Updike

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In “David Szalay: ‘If you want to be a proper writer, you have to deal with the sordid; The Booker prize-winning author of Flesh on class, punctuation, and what he learned from Amis and Updike,” Observer book critic Anthony Cummins wrote,

“Asked about the influences on Flesh during the post-prize press conference on Monday night, Szalay – fielding questions from reporters from Italy, Canada and China – said that there were lots but wasn’t able to name any. In fact he’s already namechecked several, including Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel Jacob’s Room, but it’s long been a source of speculation whether he had Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon in mind when writing Flesh. Szalay says he has seen it – when he was about 20 – ‘and the rags-to-riches arc was an influenc’. The novel Ultraluminous, by the American writer Katherine Faw, is another . . . .”

But, as Cummins added, “Szalay attributes his attraction to unsavoury subject matter to reading Martin Amis and John Updike in his teens. ‘Maybe I took from them the lesson that if you want to be a proper writer, you have to deal with the sordid. But I think it’s also that I’m always on my guard against dealing only with supposedly elevated subjects’.”

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Ink Spill spotlights more Updike on Thurber

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On one of their “Thurber Thursdays,” Ink Spill: New Yorker Cartoonists News, History, and Events was inspired by the recent publication of the Selected Letters of John Updike to do a little sleuthing and post the results.

A footnote on page 333 of Letters mentions Updike’s piece “On Meeting Writers” as being retitled “Writers I Have Met” and published in The New York Times Book Review on August 11, 1968. It “included drawings of Updike and the various writers he discusses: Joyce Cary, James Thurber, and E.B. White.”

“Thinking that Updike had drawn a self portrait along with sketches of Cary, Thurber, and White (drawings I did not recall ever seeing!) I scurried over to the Updike books here and pulled Picked-up Pieces off the shelf. ‘On Meeting Writers’ is the very first picked up piece in the book — it appears on page 3. But alas…no drawings.

“I then went to The New York Times archive and found the piece as it appeared in the paper (what an incredibly wonderful resource that is). I can’t reproduce the page here, but I can tell you I was thrilled, initially, to see drawings (I thought by Updike) accompanying it.

“They didn’t really look at all like Updike drawings, but I’ve become used to seeing how he had explored a variety of styles throughout his life — I supposed this was another exploration. But when I zoomed in on the credit for the drawings, I found the drawings were not by Updike, but by (and I mean no disrespect here by expressing disappointment) Jim Spanfeller . . . . So no Updike Thurber and E.B. White drawing, but –bonus — I learned about Mr. Spanfeller.

BBC’s ‘Front Row’ interviews James Schiff about the Updike letters

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The Nov. 11 episode of BBC’s Front Row spotlighted art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer and radical Christianity, James Schiff on Selected Letters of John Updike, and director Edgar Wright on the new dystopian film The Running Man.

The Updike material begins around the 13:30 mark when the interviewer talks with writer Gish Jen, one of many who received letters from Updike.

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Updike’s early unpublished novel may soon lose the ‘un’

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Trevor Meek, of The Local News (Ipswich, Mass.), published a Jan. 31, 2026 piece on the Selected Letters of John Updike that began,

“Living in Ipswich in the 1960s and ’70s with John Updike as a neighbor meant playing a high-stakes game of literary roulette. “On any given day, you might crack open his newest novel or short story to discover you’d been immortalized — or perhaps skewered — on a page destined to be read by millions around the world. “That uneasy thrill returned for some folks late last year with the release of Selected Letters of John Updike.

“’Even with this book, various people are looking through it to see if they’re mentioned,’ said Updike’s son, Michael, a sculptor. “’And then when they realize they are mentioned, they’re insulted,’ he added with a laugh.”

Michael Updike, heavily quoted in the article, defended his father against one of the most common charges. “He seems to be an author who is judged as a misogynist because some of his characters are selfish. . . . We don’t say Nabokov is a pedophile because his character Humbert Humbert is one in Lolita.”

Michael Updike told The Local News that he’s working on the release of his father’s unpublished novel, Home. “We’re still figuring out how to get that rolling,” he said.

We asked Michael (pictured) for more details, and here’s what he had to say:

“Chris Carduff [who edited several of Updike’s Library of America volumes] gave us the idea, saying it was a completed novel albeit rejected by a publishing house. Jim Schiff [editor of the Selected Letters] has read it and says it’s not a perfect novel but does have a lot of new material about my grandmother in it. Andrew Wylie has been sent a copy and he thinks it should be published. So much of it is hand written, and our first step is to find a good typist who will type it up in Word. Then an editor to comb out any redundant or rough spots, and Wiley will shop it around. No timeline, but hopefully soon, by publishing terms—two or three years.”

Updike didn’t talk much about Home with interviewers, but he did tell Eric Rhode in 1969, ” I had written, prior to [The Poorhouse Fair], while living in New York City, a 600-page novel, called, I think, Home, and more or less about myself and my family up to the age of 16 or so. It had been a good exercise to write it and I later used some of the material in short stories, but it really felt like a very heavy bundle of yellow paper, and I realized that this was not going to be my first novel—it had too many traits of a first novel. I did not publish it, but I thought it was time for me to write a novel.”

If Home is as heavily autobiographical as Updike suggests, perhaps it will be read and appreciated as a companion to his Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989).