Updike makes another Best of Reimagined Shakespeare list

Posted on by
Reply

Gertrude and Claudius, John Updike’s “prequel” to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, has sparked interest ever since it was published in 2000—which means it’s celebrating a silver anniversary this year . . . and still golden.

Grace Tiffany named it “Best Fictional Adaptation of Hamlet Which Excludes Hamlet” in her Literary Hub article “The Best of the Bard: Nine Literary Works That Radically Reimagine Shakespeare.”

Of Updike’s novel she writes, “Mining, as did [Dorothy] Dunnett, some of Shakespeare’s own sources, Updike relied partly on Saxo Grammaticus’ twelth-century saga of Amlothi for details about the characters on which his Danish king and queen are based.

“We meet Hamlet Senior in the flesh (rather than as a ghost), and get to know some secrets that the play keeps hidden: like, exactly how long has Gertrude been fooling around with her late husband’s brother? Updike’s eloquence is consistent, and it’s fascinating to assess the character of Hamlet—who, when on stage, won’t stop talking to us—from the kind of partial, side view first presented (more comically than here) by Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

“In Updike’s work as in Stoppard’s, Hamlet is mostly absent, a mournful and silent young man when he finally appears. The focus is on Claudius and Gertrude, and their mutual obsession. An unforgettable scene is one in which Claudius crawls through mud and worse into a barricaded garden, to perform the murderous deed to which Hamlet is aftermath. We already know what’s going to happen, but Updike’s writing compels us to turn the page.”

Read what Tiffany has to say about the other eight recommended literary turns on Shakespeare.

Rabbit novels rank high on Marianne Faithfull’s favorite books list

Posted on by
Reply

Sixties’ icon Marianne Faithfull, a singer-songwriter who was considered a major figure in the so-called “British Invasion” of U.K. music to hit the U.S. during the turbulent decade, died Jan. 30, 2025. But before her death, Faithfull, who came from an intellectual family, shared her Top 10 list of books.

Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom ranked pretty high on her list:

  1. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times – Pema Chödrön
  2. Just Kids – Patti Smith
  3. Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerita Yourcenar
  4. Rabbit Series – John Updike
  5. The Death of Bunny Munro – Nick Cave
  6. The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
  7. The Gambler – Fyodor Dostoevsky
  8. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare – Stephen Greenblatt
  9. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights – Salman Rushdie
  10. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

 

Rushdie memoir includes Updike mention

Posted on by
Reply

Updike Society member Lang Zimmerman was reading Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House, 2024) when he came upon a second-chapter account of the birth of the PEN America World Voices Festival:

Rushdie wrote, “I’ll just say that if Norman Mailer hadn’t been president of PEN back in 1986—if he hadn’t raised a ton of money and invited a glittering array of the world’s greatest writers to New York City for that legendary Congress at which Günter Grass and Saul Bellow got angry with each other about poverty in the Bronx, and John Updike used the little blue mailboxes of America as a metaphor of freedom and his coziness irritated a substantial segment of the audience, and Cynthia Ozick accused the American ex-chancellor Bruno Kreisky (a Jew himself) of anti-Semitism because he had met with Yasser Arafat, and Grace Paley got angry with Norman for putting too few women on the panels, and Nadine Gordimer and Susan Sontag disagreed with Grace because ‘literature is not an equal opportunity employer’ . . . .”

Amazon link to Knife

Essay on Updike receives Pushcart nomination

Posted on by
Reply

Jeff Werner, of Patch, writes that the editors of Neshaminy: The Bucks County Historical and Literary Journal nominated two essays for The Pushcart Prizes, as literary magazines are allowed to do. One, by Lee Bigelow Davis and Melissa D. Sullivan, was on “Operation ’64: A Matter of Civic Pride.” The other was an essay by Don Swaim:  “John Updike—One Walks by Faith, and One Writes by Faith.”

Swaim’s essay was published in the Fall/Winter 2024 issue of Neshamany: The Bucks County Historical and Literary Journal.

In Memoriam: Victor Amos Kroninger, Jr.

Posted on by
Reply

We are saddened to report that Victor Amos Kroninger, Jr. died at age 93 in his home in Blandon on Jan. 10, 2025. He was the son of Rev. Victor Kroninger, the pastor at Grace Lutheran Church when young John Updike attended services and went to Sunday School as a child.

Victor Jr. graduated from Shillington HIgh School a year before Updike, and later attended Muhlenberg College and The Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Like his father, he became a minister, serving in parishes in Bethlehem, Pottstown, Philadelphia, and Robesonia. In retirement, he assisted at Ziegels Lutheran Church in Breinigsville.

As his Reading Eagle obituary noted, “In 1994, he received the MVP award from the American Motorcycling Association ‘In recognition of valuable contributions in the interest of motorcycling.’ His joy was to treat seniors to motorcycle mini-rides. His claim to fame was John Updike’s reference to him as ‘the preacher’s son, bombing around town on a motorcycle’ in John’s novel Rabbit, Run. He enjoyed youth ministry and took many teen groups on bicycle overnight ventures . . . notably Lancaster County, Philadelphia, and once with Ziegels youth in Manhattan. In later years, he led his family band, Psalm 150, in singing “A New Song” across two synods.”

Updike Society members who attended the very first conference in Reading may remember Victor Jr. for sharing his memories of his father and John Updike when conference attendees visited Grace Lutheran.

We extend our deepest sympathies to his wife, Jeanean; sons Mark, Matt, and John; three grandchildren; and sister Anne.

Writer recalls lunch with Updike

Posted on by
Reply

Writer Clyde Haberman posted on social media yesterday that the death at age 92 of André Soltner, “the great chef who presided over Lutece in New York,” reminded him of a lunch he had there with John Updike.

“In 1996 I interviewed John Updike there, a restaurant he chose because it was near his publisher, Knopf. ‘There was sort of a symbiosis between the Knopf editorial board and Lutece,’ Updike said. Then he added, ‘I’ve never felt comfortable in here. I feel gourmet food is sort of wasted on me.'”

In “At Lunch With/John Updike; On Reading, Writing and Rabbit,” which appeared in The New York Times on March 6, 1996, Haberman wrote, “A sandwich and a glass of cranberry juice will do for lunch when [Updike] is at home, on 11 isolated acres in Beverly Farms, Mass., about 25 miles north of Boston. At this point, Mr. Updike said, he has to watch his waistline almost as much as his language.

“‘There’s no disguising the fact that a writer’s life is a sedentary one and prone to incessant snacking if you work at home,’ he said. ‘The little break of going down to get another oatmeal cookie is almost irresistible. So I try to make up for the cookies by not eating much at lunch.’

“Even when he was a boy in Shillington, Pa., outside the working-class town of Reading, literature and food converged. ‘I was a great peanut-butter lover from childhood on,’ he recalled. ‘The way I used to read was, we had an old sofa in the house, and I’m make a sandwich consisting of peanut butter and raisins. You’d eat one of those while you read John Dickson Carr or some other mystery writer, or James Thurber of Robert Benchley. In that way, many a happy afternoon went by.'”

Despite Updike’s talk of watching his caloric intake, Haberman wrote, “Let it be noted that he held up fine under the gustatory strain of Lutece, polishing off a serving of grouper after a cup of pumpkin soup and a puff pastry of sweetbreads and spinach. He did draw the line at dessert.”

In his 1-19-25 social media post, Haberman remarked, “That lunch with Updike . . . was one of those times when I enjoyed myself thoroughly and marveled that I actually got paid for such moments. I felt the same after interviewing Umberto Eco in Bologna a few years earlier.”

New York Public Library announces New Yorker centennial exhibition

Posted on by
Reply

“A Century of The New Yorker” exhibition will open at The New York Public Library on February 22, 2025, City Life Org reported. The exhibition “showcases the historic transformations” of one of America’s iconic and most distinguished magazines.

Displays will include founding documents, rare manuscripts, photos, cover and cartoon art, and artifacts on loan from other institutions–all intended to take visitors “behind the scenes of the making of one of the United States’s most important magazines,” according to City Life Org.

The New Yorker transferred its extensive archive and records to The New York Public Library in 1991. That archive—2,500 boxes (1058 linear feet)—is one of the Library’s largest collections.

Highlights from the exhibition include:

  • The prospectus for The New Yorker (1924)
  • Original artwork for the first issue of The New Yorker by Rea Irvin (1925)
  • W.H. Auden’s handwritten draft of “Refugee Blues” (1939)
  • John Updike’s handwritten assignments for Talk of the Town (1950s)
  • Original signed art by Helen Hokinson (1941)
  • The New Yorker type identification and style guide (1981)
  • Correspondence between William Shawn and John Hersey related to “Hiroshima” (1946)
  • The typescript draft of “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote, with revisions and deletions by William Shawn (1965)
  • Hannah Arendt’s original typescript manuscript of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” (1963)
  • Cynthia Ozick, “The Fallibility Rag,” poem dedicated to New Yorker grammarian Eleanor Gould (1987)
  • A mock-up of the first New Yorker website and other 21st-century artifacts
  • Original film featuring current and recent writers, editors, and staff exploring the history, legacy, and future of The New Yorker.

Members of the John Updike and Philip Roth societies who attend the joint conference in New York City in October 19-22, 2025 will have time to head to Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street to explore the library and the exhibition.

Writer suggests Updike invented Brat culture

Posted on by
Reply

Could John Updike be responsible for, or at least on the cutting edge of a cultural shift toward individualism? English columnist and writer Sarah Ditum was inclined to think so. Born roughly 50 years after Updike, Ditum wrote in unHerd that Harry Angstrom’s problem was “the typical problem of a 26-year-old Western man living in 1959, when John Updike’s novel Rabbit, Run is set.” In the late 1950s, she wrote, “making the passage from youth to adulthood in your twenties was not merely possible—it was compulsory. In a culture that was tentatively embracing personal freedom, (marriage, a job, and a first child at 23) could feel more like prison than possibility.”

Ditum reminded readers of the impetus behind Updike’s writing of the novel: “Jack Kerouac’s On the Road came out in 1957, and without reading it, I resented its apparent injunction to cut loose; Rabbit, Run was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American man goes on the road—the people left behind get hurt. There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties’ fraying but still tight social weave.”

Rabbit’s run, Ditum suggested, was “less a rebellion, more a rush towards the new kind of conformity, scratched out against the great dominating influence of mass-media but nonetheless shaped by it. The moment Rabbit decides to make his escape is probably when he gets home to see his wife slumped in front of a children’s TV show” and “Rabbit is appalled at the banality. . . . His drive towards freedom is soundtracked by the radio.”

“It’s a commonplace that the Fifties invented the teenager, but really the teenager was only a side-product of the decade’s greater creation: the individual in lifelong pursuit of self-realization. An age of personal freedom, carved against the backdrop of screens that declared how a person should be: mass media defined a mean reality, and taught its consumers how to want the things that would mark them as an individual like everybody else. . . . Rabbit’s predicament feels alien now partly because the things that hemmed him in are now almost exotically elusive for young people, but also because the media landscape he’s both repulsed by and defined by doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. At the very least, his disappointing wife would have been scrolling TikTok as well as watching television; Rabbit would probably have been listening to podcasts.”

Bottom line? “The rush to individualism that Rabbit embodied has turned everyone back into a version of him. The TV host’s message to Rabbit—”know yourself”—becomes its inverse: be knowable to the world. And by being knowable, buyable. The consumer and the consumable in one perfect whole.”

Read the whole essay.

Pietrzyk named 2025 John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship winner

Posted on by
Reply

Leslie Pietrzyk, whose first collection of short stories, The Angel on My Chest, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, was selected over 193 applicants to be the 2025 John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellow. The fellowship consists of a $1000 prize from The John Updike Society and a two-week residency at the casitas formerly owned by John and Martha Updike, where the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner spent time golfing and writing in his later years. The casitas, located in the Santa Catalina Foothills, are owned by Jan and Jim Emery, and the annual residency is made possible by their generosity. (Photo: Wikipedia)

While at the casitas, Pietrzyk will work on Nothing to See Here, a collection of linked stories about a neighborhood girl who disappears from a Midwestern town, written not as a police procedural or Gone Girl mystery, but rather to address the “emotional impact of growing up in a time and place where girls and women disappear.” She talks briefly about her project in this interview.

Lead judge Robert M. Luscher, an Updike society board member, praised Pietrzyk for tackling a “variety of significant cultural issues in its metaphoric critique of female disappearance. Though these stories of peripheral, collateral damage are set in the 1970s, sadly their themes are even more relevant today than the time during which the stories take place.”

The porches at the casitas, where Updike liked to write while looking at a spectacular view of Tucson.

John Updike was the subject of Pietrzyk’s senior creative writing project at Northwestern University. She received her B.A. in English/Creative writing from Northwestern and an M.F.A. from American University. Currently teaching in the Converse University Low-Residency MFA program in Spartanburg, S.C., Pietrzyk has published three novels (Pears on a Willow Tree, A Year and a Day, and Silver Girl), one historical novel (Reversing the River), and two short story collections (This Angel on My Chest and Admit This to No One). Her story “Stay There” won a 2020 Pushcart Prize, and she was named co-winner of the Polish American Historical Association’s 2020 Creative Arts Prize for promoting “an awareness of the Polish experience in the Americas” through her fiction. Previously she completed residencies at Hawthornden Castle, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Wolff Cottage (in Fairhope, Ala.), The Hambidge Center, and an ARGS Residency in St. Petersburg, Va.

Three judges for the John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship competition considered the quality of project, quality of writing sample, potential benefit to Updike studies or generating awareness, publication potential, and previous publications or relevant biographical details. Pietrzyk is the second recipient. The first was Dr. Sue Norton, a Technological University Dublin lecturer whose project was a critical essay, “Somewhere Between Feminism and Misogyny: Classic Updike on the Modern Syllabus.”

The annual competition is open to all writers, with the residency offered two weeks in May. Applications for the 2026 competition are due Nov. 1, 2025. See the John Updike Society website for details.

In Memoriam: David W. Ruoff

Posted on by
Reply

With heavy hearts we report that the senior docent of The John Updike Childhood Home, David W. Ruoff, died Jan. 1 at age 83 of congestive heart failure while in hospice care in Ephrata. Dave became a member of The John Updike Society in 2012 after he began renting the single-story annex to The John Updike Childhood Home, back when it was still a deconstruction zone.

From the beginning, though, Dave was more than a renter. He became a great friend to society president James Plath, who traveled from Illinois to Shillington to work on the house several times each year over the course of the decade it took to restore the house to be historically accurate and to create a museum Berks County could be proud of. Dave loved Updike and was willing to help any way he could. He began by receiving items shipped to the society and by giving impromptu tours to people who came to the house, telling them how he grew up on Philadelphia Ave. just two blocks from the Updike house at 117.

Dave loved regaling visitors with stories about Updike’s father, Wesley, whom he had for a teacher, and he loved going the extra mile and giving people who had traveled to Shillington from abroad or great distances samples of Berks County ring bologna and Tom Sturgis pretzels—the latter, Updike’s favorite. Sometimes, if they asked for directions to Plowville, Dave would even drive them . . . after first showing them the Updike sites in Shillington that they might have otherwise missed. And when an alarm would go off in the middle of the night, Dave, one of three people with a key, always volunteered to get his coat and gun and drive over to make sure everything was all right.

Although it takes a village to create a museum that’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places and has a Pennsylvania Historic Marker—a museum that The Wall Street Journal last year called “a worthy site of literary pilgrimage”—Dave was part of a core group most responsible for the museum’s creation and operation. In addition, numerous people over the years have made donations to the society based on their interaction with Dave, whose community pride and passion for Updike was contagious.

The society loved him back. On October 2, 2021, the board honored him as the sixth recipient of The John Updike Society Distinguished Service Award, praising his “extraordinary docent work and other services to The John Updike Childhood Home.” Dave was funny, generous, thoughtful, and a little bit larger than life. He’ll be greatly missed.

The obituary notes that Dave graduated from Gov. Mifflin High School in 1959 as a double athlete (football and wrestling), served in the Army with the 82nd Airbourne, and was a “proud member of the Special Forces as a Green Beret.” Dave was in the insurance business for 55 years and loved hunting, biking, and spending time with his family. Here is the full obituary, which details where donations can be made.

Our deepest sympathies go to his wife, Maria, daughter Tara, son Jim, grandchildren Zack, Cole and Rayne, great-grandchildren Tanner and Beckett, and all members of the Ruoff extended family.