Andrew Wylie, whom Martha Updike hired to act as literary agent for the Updike Estate, told The New York Observer that a collection of Updike’s essays would be given to Knopf this fall. Observer reporter Leon Neyfakh also wrote in his January 5 article that Max Rudin, publisher of the Library of America series, has been in discussions with Wylie about Library of America editions of Updike’s work, “something the author was very eager to do while he was alive but couldn’t because such editions would compete directly with Knopf’s Everyman’s Library series.” As for the essays, we asked Andrew Wylie if he could tell us whether the volume would be a compilation of previously published material, ala More Matter and Due Considerations, or if they were previously unpublished essays that came closer to Self-Consciousness. “It’s premature to say more now,” Wylie responded. “Sometime in the fall there may be more news.”

For another story about Wylie’s acquisition of the Updike account, see the January 6 Daily Finance article by Sarah Weinman.

In the upcoming Person of the Year 2009 issue of Time magazine, John Updike received a “fond farewell” from Charles McGrath, a former deputy editor of The New Yorker and current writer-at-large for The New York Times.  Updike was one of 45 people no longer with us that Time decided to honor.

The John Updike Society now has a Facebook page, and there are two photo galleries so far and a discussion board where members can start topics and engage each other and Updike fans in discussions ranging from teaching Updike and interpreting texts to collecting Updike. The link is on the left column menu. Let us know what we can do to improve the Facebook page and this one. The photo here is from one of the galleries. It’s John at age 7, taken by his mother, Linda. Courtesy of Jack De Bellis.

So visit the John Updike Society Facebook page and become a “fan.” And don’t forget to send me your news to post on the Society’s website!

Though The John Updike Society was formed fewer than seven months ago and launched with only 35 members, we’ve hit the 100 mark with the addition of Liliana Naydan, a doctoral candidate at SUNY-Stony Brook.

“I became interested in Updike a few years ago,” Naydan writes, “after studying his work with my now dissertation director, Prof. Stacey Olster (editor of The Cambridge Companion to John Updike). My dissertation, titled Fictions of Faith: American Literature, Religion, and the Millenium, includes a chapter on Updike (as well as Philip Roth and Don DeLillo).”

Her chapter on Updike considers “how Updike’s understanding of faith transforms on the eve of the second millennium. I argue that in In the Beauty of the Lillies Updike attempts to bridge apparent divide that fanatical believers, especially early fundamentalists, created between believing in God and embracing the developments of the 20th century as fruitful, not mere signs that an increasingly immoral American nation is rapidly devolving in the face of a fast-approaching, apocalyptic end.  I consider Updike’s earlier works, especially the Rabbit tetralogy, proposing that Updike’s focus in it is on the distinction between faith and good works as means by which to attain salvation.  In the Rabbit novels, only true faith appears to have the power to redeem man.  But in In the Beauty of the Lilies, Updike comes to distinguish between different kinds of faith, and he critiques religious fanaticism, specifically as it has emerged in the latter part of the 20th century.  Even though a fanatic’s faith is true, the intensity of that true belief creates the potential to transcend the bounds of what Updike views as characteristically good. Ultimately, I suggest that Updike comes to advocate for justification through temperance by way of his allusions to biblical and cinematic narratives.  He makes reference to the biblical Book of Esther, which suggests that God exists in the world even in the absence of clear evidence of His existence.  More to the point, he turns to Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937) for his key message of temperance in all things.”