Category Archives: Updike Quoted

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.

Atlas Obscura maps John Updike’s headstone

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Atlas Obscura recently added a location for the “Headstone of John Updike; A unique tombstone, lovingly made by the author’s son, honors his literary talents.”

“Nestled in a churchyard in the small Pennsylvanian town of Mohnton, a peculiar gravestone stands out among the sturdy and square monuments of modern times. The black slate stone is an uncanny homage to the early grave markers of Puritan New England. It even includes a death’s head motif, but with a twist. Instead of a gaunt, ghastly skull with wings, it features the wide, smiling face of the interred: author John Hoyer Updike. . . .

“His unique headstone was carved by his son, Michael. In an interview with Northshore Magazine, he remarks on his father’s fear of death, which prompted him to capture his grin indefinitely.  John’s different monikers fill the empty space in an easygoing, curling script. Michael even inscribed one of John’s early poems on the backside. It reads:

Why the Telephone Wires Dip and the Poles Are Cracked and Crooked

The old men say
young men in gray
hung this thread across our plains
acres and acres ago
But we, the enlightened, know
in point of fact it’s what remains
of the flight of a marvelous crow
no one saw:
each pole, a caw.

“The headstone is not only a touching tribute to a father and author, but to a man’s undying love of New England and its iconography.”

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.

Listen to the episode

GOATPoets features Updike spending “An Oddly Lovely Day Alone”

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There are so many interesting websites, blogs, and YouTube channels that you can find something “new” every day, it seems.

Today that new discovery was GOATPoets, which featured John Updike reading “An Oddly Lovely Day Alone,” a poem that has echoes of Richard Maple making due while Joan is off and about.

Have a look and listen

 

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).

Updike cited as a Guardian of Language

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If your pet peeves include people who speak the language with little regard for or knowledge of correctness, you might be interested in a Jan. 10 Quillette article by Bruce Gilley on “Guarding the Gates of Our Language; One hundred years after the publication of Fowler’s ‘Dictionary of Modern English Usage,’ it is more important than ever to uphold standards of correct English.”

Of course, “America’s Man of Letters,” as William Pritchard dubbed him, was cited. John Updike, the master stylist and a precise practitioner of the language, was apparently involved in a kerfuffle involving his beloved New Yorker:

“Most surprising, perhaps, is the enduring allegiance to Fowler at The New Yorker, citadel of oppressed writers, and writers on oppression, in modern American letters. In a curtain-raiser in September 2025 for the Fowler centenary, the University of Delaware academic Ben Yagoda traced the inextricable links between the magazine, launched in 1925, and Fowler, almost as if the magazine was founded as a sort of Society for the Propagation of the Fowler in the United States. In one telling anecdote culled from the magazine’s archives, Yagoda found that the young John Updike, while studying at Oxford in 1954, had submitted a poem to the magazine that was caught up in a minor storm of editorial debate on punctuation according to Fowler. Updike bowed before the strictures, and his corrected poem was published later that year. Thereafter, he seems to have become Keeper of the Fowler at The New Yorker. His scathing review of Burchfield’s 1996 desecration is a monument to fine English sensibilities in the New World. ‘It has the charm, in this age of cultural diversity and politically correct sensitivity, of assuring all users of English that no intelligible usage is absolutely wrong,’ Updike writes. ‘But it proposes no ideal of clarity in language or, beyond that, of grace, which might serve as an instrument of discrimination.’ That word again.

“As Updike foresaw, the globalisation of English and the radicalisation of the academy mean that the need for Fowler has become greater not less. ‘The language is a mess, except as scoured and rinsed and hung out to dry by Fowler.’”

Read the whole article

New Yorker previews upcoming John Updike Selected Letters volume

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Members of The John Updike Society are looking forward to the release of the Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff and scheduled for October publication by Knopf, Updike’s main publisher since 1959. Members who attend the Roth-Updike Conference will have the chance to get signed copies in New York.  As a teaser, The New Yorker today posted “An Adolescent Crush That Never Let Up: An epistolary history of a fifty-five-year relationship with The New Yorker, by John Updike.” The post is dated July 11, 2025, which is sure to confuse people in the future, regardless of whether they know Updike died in 2009.

The letters begin with a March 1949 query from Updike, still a high school student, asking for “some information on those little filler drawings you publish, and, I presume, buy. What size should they be? Mounted or not? Are there any preferences as to subject matter, weight of cardboard, and technique?”

The remaining letters are directed to various editors, his parents (whom he addresses as “Plowvillians”), and others that collectively give some sense of his relationship with The New Yorker. The final letter, addressed to fiction editor Deborah Treisman, is a poignant one, given that it was written just 17 days before Updike passed away:

“. . . I suppose of the many things I have tried to write, short stories have given me most gratification and unqualified pleasure. I am glad that what looks to be my last book, to be published this June, is short stories, called My Father’s Tears, probably the best of the bunch. But I would feel less happy about the collection if you and your editorial colleagues had not allowed me to cap it with two New Yorker acceptances—the little suburban fling in the power outage, and the rambling reminisce about happiness and sex and water and the little journey of a NE American life. I feel much happier about a collection that begins and ends with The New Yorker, where I began and ended.

Updike’s American Everyman is referenced in a July 4 think piece

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It’s July 4 in the U.S., and Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is once again in the news—or rather, a think piece. Warning: Though Harry leaned right, The Nation, in which this piece by Jeet Heer appears, leans left. One statistic, though, seems more personal than political, because the comparison year (2004) is one during which another Republican president, George W. Bush, was in office:

Currently, “Only 58 percent of Americans say they are extremely proud or very proud of their country. (This is down from a high of 91 percent in 2004.) Among Democrats, this number stands at 38 percent, among independents at 53 percent. Among Gen Z Americans (born between 1997 and 2012), only 41 percent feel pride in their country.”

Heer had written, “Not too long ago, the Fourth of July was a festive occasion: a day of national celebration, hot dogs and parades, flag-waving and fireworks. John Updike memorialized the traditional July 4 holiday in Rabbit at Rest (1990), the final novel of his Rabbit trilogy. In that novel, Updike’s antihero, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high school basketball star now in his paunchy and troubled late middle age, dresses up as Uncle Sam for a parade in his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania (a thinly disguised rendition of the real-life Reading). His fake beard uneasily held on by Scotch tape, Angstrom surveys the American throng gathered in patriotic jubilation:

White-haired women sit in their aluminum lawn chairs down by the curb dressed like fat babies in checks and frills, their shapeless veined legs cheerfully protruding. Middle-aged men have squeezed their keglike thighs into bicycle shorts meant for boys. Young mothers have come from their back-yard aboveground swimming pools in bikinis and high-sided twists of spandex that leave half their buttocks and breasts exposed.

“Like Angstrom, the celebrants are imperfect and beset by their own private anxieties, but also beneficiaries of a country that has allowed them in some small way to enjoy the Jeffersonian promise of the pursuit of happiness. Exultant despite his physical diminishment, Angstrom has an epiphany: ‘Harry’s eyes burn and the impression giddily—as if he had been lifted up to survey all human history—grows upon him, making his heart thump worse and worse, that all in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.”

Read the whole article. 

Killing time by chasing Updike

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Every creative person has preferred ways of taking a break. For cartoonist Michael Maslin (“Wednesday Spill: Hunting for the Whereabouts of an Updike Moment”), one of those breaks began by looking at his Updike books and pulling one off the shelf. As it turns out, his diversion is the literary scholar’s method:

“Gearing up for the book of John Updike letters coming out in October I thought I’d once again travel through Adam Begley’s terrif Updike. Curiosity took me on a hunt when I came across this sentence on page 426:

“’A decade later, when he came across a well-thumbed copy of S in a small public library in the Hudson Valley, he remembered how he had put his “heart and soul” into the heroine and concluded that the novel had at last been “recognized”.’

“It was the ‘…small public library in the Hudson Valley…’ that sent me scampering to Google. As I live in the Hudson Valley and am acquainted with a number of its libraries, I figured I’d be able to (hopefully!) quickly zero in on which library Updike visited. Researching the Peter Arno biography i wrote, I quickly learned things just don’t go as smoothly as you might think when on a fact-finding mission.

“The ‘Notes’ in Begley’s Updike biography indicate the ‘…small public library…’ passage was sourced from Updike’s Odd Jobs, page 761. I headed right to Odd Jobs, page 761, but the passage wasn’t there. Dead end. It happens (my biography of Peter Arno has its share of ‘issues.’). I briefly considered writing Mr. Begley, but decided that this was too small a ‘thing’ for him to be troubled with. A day or two went by. I tried to let the hunt go. Then, this afternoon, having worked on cartoons for hours, and in need of a break, I sat next to the Updike section of our bookshelves and thought for a moment. What if the page number 761 was correct, but the book title was off. I began looking through Updike’s various hefty collections, beginning with Higher Gossip: zip. Due Considerations: zip. More Matter…bingo! There, on page 761 is this from Updike’s ‘Me and My Books’ — it was originally published in The New Yorker, February 3, 1997:

“‘On one steel shelf, in a Hudson Valley town with its own tributary creek gurgling over a dam and under a bridge near the library door…’

“I began thinking about the Hudson Valley libraries I was familiar with. None of them fit Updike’s description. So back to Google and to the list of libraries lining the Hudson Valley. Using Google maps (aerial view) I was able to easily see if any library was that close to water. I struck out with perhaps twenty or so libraries, when I saw this location in Marlboro, New York. And then using the street view, there it was, exactly as Updike described it: ‘tributary creek gurgling over a dam and under a bridge.’ This scene is directly across from the Gomez Mill House.

Updike Childhood Home adds two paintings from the fiction

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John Updike’s children recently donated more one-of-a-kind objects to The John Updike Childhood Home & Museum, among them two still life paintings that their father and mother had painted side-by-side while Updike was a student at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford, England. Michael Updike said that as a trailing spouse who majored in art as an undergrad, his mother talked her way into sitting in and participating in John’s classes. Mary sat to his father’s right, Michael pointed out, given the placement of objects on each canvas. The paintings are referenced in Updike’s short story “Still Life” (from Pigeon Feathers, reprinted in The Early Stories):

“At the greengrocer’s on Monday morning they purchased still life ingredients. The Constable School owned a great bin of inanimate objects, from which Leonard had selected an old mortar and pestle. His idea was then to buy, to make a logical picture, some vegetables that could be ground, and to arrange them in a Chardinesque tumble. But what, really, was ground, except nuts? The grocer did have some Jamaican walnuts.

“Don’t be funny, Leonard,” Robin said. “All those horrid little wrinkles, we’d be at it forever.”

“Well, what else could you grind?”

“We’re not going to grind anything; we’re going to paint it. What we want is something smoothe.”

“Oranges, miss?” the lad in charge offered.

“Oh, oranges. Everyone’s doing oranges—looks like a pack of advertisements for vitamin C. What we want…” Frowning, she surveyed the produce, and Leonard’s heart, plunged in the novel intimacy of shopping with a woman, beat excitedly. “Onions,” Robin declared. “Onions are what we want.”

John gave his still life to his mother, who displayed it at the Plowville house, while Mary kept hers. Now the paintings are together again, above the bed that John painted with his mother—John’s on the left, Mary’s on the right . . . just as in Oxford.

Visit and look at the paintings up close and vote: Who did it best? John (left) or Mary (right)?

The John Updike Childhood Home & Museum, 117 Philadelphia Ave. in Shillington, Pa., is owned and operated by the 501c3 John Updike Society. It is open most Saturdays from 12-2 p.m. For questions about visiting the museum, contact director Maria Lester, johnupdikeeducation@gmail.com.