Andromeda Romano-Lax posted a blog entry on a website called 49 Writers that lists the books John Updike was reading at the time of his death in 2009—apparently in preparation for an unfinished novel he was writing.
Here’s the link.
Adam Begley, who is under contract to produce an as-yet-untitled biography of John Updike for HarperCollins, writes that the work is going well and that there’s enthusiastic support for the project. In addition to a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship that got him started, he has received a 2011-12 fellowship from The Leon Levy Center for Biography, based on a section from the third chapter that he submitted. The chapter details the 18 months that Updike spent in New York City.
Research is progressing nicely, Begley says, adding that he still was work to do in Pennsylvania and that he’s in the middle of a long fourth chapter about Ipswich. “I spend most of every day with John Updike,” Begley writes, “and after more than two years I can report that I haven’t been bored for a minute.”
Begley says he’s hoping to have a first draft completed by the end of June 2012 so he will be free when new Updike materials at the Houghton Library become available to researchers in July 2012. Publication of the biography is set for sometime in 2013.
The whole Society will gather in Boston in June 2012, but this year at ALA the two panels sponsored by the Society were full of great papers that provoked interesting discussions. Here are the minutes-5-28-2011-1 from the business meeting. They won’t be approved until the next meeting. Thanks to Judie Newman, Peter Bailey, Ed Allen, Brian Steffen, Richard Androne, Kangqin Li, John McTavish, and Quentin MIller for participating.
He’s not the first to do so, but British journalist and America’s Got Talent judge Piers Morgan pulled out a copy of John Updike’s Marry Me when it came time to pop the question. His now-fiancé is apparently quite the Updike fan. Here’s the STV article. Thanks to Jack De Bellis for drawing it to our attention.
It’s official: the dates for the Second Biennial John Updike Society Conference at Suffolk University in Boston are June 13-16, 2012. Plan on getting to Boston the night of the 12th if you don’t want to miss anything. As with the first conference, there will be a combination of academic sessions and panels/talks from people who knew John Updike well. While field trips are still being arranged, the Houghton Library (pictured) will mount a special exhibit and host a reception for attendees, and we’ll spend an afternoon at Harvard seeing some of the Updike sites there. We’ll also take a trip to the North Shore to see Updike sites, with another trip to Salem that will tie in with panels on Updike and Hawthorne. We may also take a side trip to Fenway Park.
So mark your calendars and start thinking of what new research and insights you might share with members. Here’s the Call for Papers
The first issue of The John Updike Review will arrive in September, with a hard copy mailed to all paid-in-full members (dues statements are on their way). In addition, editor James Schiff announced the sponsorship of The John Updike Review Emerging Writers Prize, which consists of $1000 and publication in the Review.
Anyone 40 years of age or younger is invited to enter. Submissions are open and rolling. Depending upon the quality of submissions, one or more winners will be announced annually.
The John Updike Review is looking for an essay by a young writer or critic that deepens our understanding of the work of John Updike. The writing may be scholarly or belletristic in nature. Academics, critics, graduate students, assistant professors, novelists, poets, and short story writers are encouraged to submit essays, which should be 10 to 30 pages long.
Send submissions via attachment to: Prof. James Schiff, Editor, The John Updike Review, james.schiff@uc.edu. For more information about the journal, visit the website.
Amazon.com has begun accepting preorders for Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism, edited by Christopher Carduff. Here’s the link.
As we reported earlier, Higher Gossip is divided into five sections:
“Real Conversation” consists of two previously published personal essays, one previously published humorous piece, three previously published short fictions, and six poems (”The Lovelorn Astronomer,” “Basium XVI,” “Head of a Girl, at the Met,” “Cafeteria, Mass. General Hospital,” “An Hour Without Color,” and “Not Cancelled Yet.”
“Book Chat” includes three speeches (”Humor in Fiction,” “The Plight of the American Writer,” and “The Written Word”); tributes to Kierkegaard, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Sissman, and Carver; three forewords/afterwords; and 15 book reviews.
“Gallery Tours” features 20 essays on art, and “Pet Topics” contains three previously published essays on science, six musings on Massachusetts (including “Harvard Square in the Fifties,” “Ipswich in the Seventies,” and “Memoirs of a Massachusetts Golfer”), and five post-Golf Dreams writings on golf.
“Table Talk” is the ephemeral category, including remarks made at book conventions, short musing, forewords, addresses, letters, prefaces, notes, and a humorous piece on “The original ending of Self-Consciousness.“
Sylvie Mathé, Professor of American Literature at the Université de Provence, writes that the paper she presented on “Updike’s Lifetime Homage to Pennsylvania” at the Alvernia conference was reformatted as “In Memoriam,” an homage that was recently published in the online journal Transatlantica. Here’s the link to the full-text document.
The David Silcox/Thelma Lewis Collection was delivered to The John Updike Society Archive at Alvernia University in December, 2010, and on May 6, 2011 The Larry C. Randen Collection will be deposited with Alvernia archivist Eugene Mitchell, whom members met at the October conference.
According to Randen, the collection consists of “twelve Banker’s Boxes, four of which are books by and about Updike, plus movie DVDs, videos, CDs, and cassettes. The other eight boxes contain 24 three-inch and four-inch 3-ring notebooks with plastic protector sheets that contain reviews, articles, essays, etc. by and about Updike,” with a CD provided that contains much of the material.
Randen added, “There is a wealth of material in the collection that also includes a lot of photographs of Updike published after his death which I’ve printed out on glossy photographic paper. I have most of the caricatures of Updike done by David Levine (1926-2009) for The New York Review of Books, plus other comic likenesses done by Ken Fallin, Zach Trenholm, and other artists. I believe any interested inquirer paging through the file books will be in for some real surprises about the breadth of information gathered in them.”
Randen said he collected the material along with David Lull as co-researchers for The Centaurian website operated by James Yerkes. “I’m truly grateful my collection will join The David Silcox/Thelma Lewis Collection and the Rachael C. Burchard Papers as part of The John Updike Society Archives and other collections of Updike materials this concentration might attract in the future. It’s been a source of great personal satisfaction and enrichment to discover and preserve these literary artifacts for posterity,” Randen said.
The syllabus for a third-year course (EH4016) on “State of the Union: American Literature since 1890” being taught at the University of Limmerick (Ireland) requires students to read five novels. One of them is John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. The others are Don DeLillo’s White Noise, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. No Hemingway and Faulkner, you may ask? Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” did make the syllabus, as did Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” along with short stories from James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver, and poems from Allen Ginsberg and Harlem Renaissance poets.