Presenters and moderators needed for 2013 ALA Conference in Boston

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The John Updike Society needs presenters and moderators to fill two panels at the 2013 American Literature Association Conference in Boston, Mass. The conference runs from May 23-26 and will be held once again at the Westin Copley Place, right across from the library and within an easy walk of the Commons.

Proposals for papers and expressions of interest in moderating should be sent to:  James Plath (jplath@iwu.edu) by the end of December.

We hope that the JUS can be a presence at ALA. If you live within a short drive of Boston or are planning on attending ALA anyway, please consider helping our organization by participating on one of two panels.

Graduate students and independent scholars working on Updike need not currently be a member of The John Updike Society in order to submit a proposal.

Amazon accepting pre-orders for John Updike: A Critical Biography

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Bob Batchelor’s “John Updike: A Critical Biography,” which will be published by Praeger on April 30, 2013, is now available for pre-order at Amazon.

Here’s the description of the hardcover (226-page) book:

Widely considered “America’s Man of Letters,” John Updike is a prolific novelist and critic with an unprecedented range of work across more than 50 years. No writer has ever written from the variety of vantages or spanned topics like Updike did. Despite being widely recognized as one of the nation’s literary greats, scholars have largely ignored Updike’s vast catalog of work outside the Rabbit tetralogy. This work provides the first detailed examination of Updike’s body of criticism, poetry, and journalism.

Examining Updike’s criticism and journalism, popular culture scholar Bob Batchelor shows how that work played a central role in transforming his novels. The book disputes the common misperception of Updike as merely a chronicler of suburban, middle-class America by focusing on his novels and stories that explore the wider world, from the groundbreaking The Coup (1978)  to Terrorist (2006). John Updike: A Critical Analysis asks readers to reassess Updike’s career by tracing his transformation over half a century of writing.

Early Updike scholar passes

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The Society is saddened to report that Robert “Bob” McCoy passed away on Sunday, November 4. Dr. McCoy was the San Diego State University administrator/scholar behind the stage production of Buchanan Dying at the Little Theatre there March 18-20 and March 25-27, 1977, as part of The Institute for Readers Theatre Series. McCoy had written his dissertation on Updike’s short stories in 1974 at the University of Southern California.

Member James Yerkes says that Bob was “generous to a fault with information about his long personal acquaintance with Updike and a true gentleman scholar.” He is survived in San Diego by his wife, Arlene, and two sons.

In a post-election essay, Tanenhaus praises Rabbit Redux

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Sam Tanenhaus, who interviewed John Updike on many occasions, wrote in a post-election essay that Rabbit Redux “remains the most illuminating and prophetic of modern political novels, though on the surface it seems not about politics at all.”

Here’s the link to “John Updike’s ‘Rabbit Redux’ and White Working-Class Angst,” with thanks to Maria Mogford for drawing our attention to it. The photo is courtesy of The New York Times.

Bookseller offers volumes from Updike’s personal collection

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Mark Stolle, who owns the used bookstore Manchester By the Book in Manchester, Mass., writes that he purchased books from John Updike periodically. He kept most of them at the house but is now bringing a few to the store to sell. Most are inscribed to Updike from well-known authors. If anyone is interested they can contact him by email (Manchesterbythebook@gmail.com) or phone (978-525-2929). Some of you may have spoken with him in Boston, as he attended our conference.

A new in-depth scholarly review of Terrorist surfaces

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Amien Kacou has reviewed Updike’s “Terrorist” for Perspectives on Terrorism: a journal of the Terrorism Research Initiative. It’s a lengthy, scholarly article that the editor notes “takes a research article format, which is a nontraditional approach; it offers a thesis, based on an extended, footnoted philosophical study.” It appears online in Vol. 6, No. 4-5 (2012).

Here’s the link, with thanks to Larry Randen for calling it to our attention.

Rabbit, Run included in Banned Books Trading Card Project

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Updike once remarked that he liked to think of his books being discovered by a young boy somewhere in Kansas, and that looks like a real possibility, since the Lawrence Public Library in Lawrence, Kansas, seems to be a firm believer in fighting censorship. This year they’ve “assembled sets of seven cards designed by local artists and inspired by banned books or authors.” Updike’s Rabbit, Run was one of the seven. You can buy the sets by mail. This item comes from Jack De Bellis, who probably has already ordered his set.

Here’s the link.

A footnote on Updike’s “A Mild Complaint” surfaces

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Updike’s short story “A Mild Complaint” appeared in Ian Frazier’s Humor Me: An Anthology of Funny Contemporary Writing (Plus Some Great Old Stuff, Too) (Ecco Press, 2010) with this footnote, which appears in the author’s introduction:

“Also, unconnected to anything, here’s a note, just FYI: The John Updike piece, “A Mild Complaint,” which concludes Part I, was famous at the New Yorker as the piece that the magazine held on to the longest before it was published. Updike wrote the piece, and the magazine bought it, in the mid-1950s, when he was a young man. For inscrutable reasons the New Yorker then kept the piece for twenty-some years and finally ran it in the 1970s [sic, actually April 19, 1982], when Updike was in his middle years. The piece is included here as a testament to the resilience of literature, and as a wave to Mr. Updike, wherever in the afterlife he may be” (xi-xii).

Frazier’s remarks can be found in context at this link. Thanks to member Larry Randen for passing it along.