Author: Updike anticipated the MAGA movement

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On July 3, 2026, Rashmee Roshan Lall mentioned Updike in This Week, Those Books, which aims to provide “in roughly five minutes, crucial context—from fiction and non-fiction—to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.” The “Big Story” this week was, of course, America’s 250th birthday. Of Updike, Lall writes,

“Considering America’s 250th birthday is supervised by President Donald Trump, it’s worth examining this novel by one of the country’s greatest 20th-century writers. This John Updike novel is a forerunner of MAGA nostalgia for a golden past set in the 1950s. It’s the second book in Updike’s quartet of novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Set in the late 1960s, we see a restless Harry. He has moved on from his schooldays as a basketball star of his small Pennsylvanian town of Brewer. Now, he is now a Linotype operator in a local factory. He has a teenage son, a cooling marriage and feels an increasing sense of irritation at the racial and cultural changes underway. He feels that the America he knew is slipping away. Harry is a nice chap in all sorts of ways, but it really does feel like he shares a lot with Trump’s angry, working-class base.”

Choice Quote (from Rabbit Redux): “It’s as if, all these Afro hair bushes and gold earrings and hoopy noise on buses, seeds of some tropical plant sneaked in by the birds were taking over the garden. His garden. Rabbit knows it’s his garden and that’s why he’s put a flag decal on the back window of the Falcon even though Janice says it’s corny and fascist. In the papers you read about these houses in Connecticut where the parents are away in the Bahamas and the kids come in and smash it up for a party. More and more this country is getting like that. As if it just grew here instead of people laying down their lives to build it.”

Read the whole post.

UK Times names ‘Rabbit, Run’ one of America’s Top 25 works of literature

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The Times (UK) paid tribute to the United States of America’s 250th anniversary by asking critics to name “their favourite American films, books, TV shows, and more, from Star Wars to Campbell’s Soup.”

For the literature category, Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times chief literary critic for Culture & Books, selected John Updike’s Rabbit, Run as one of her 25 best—and that’s over the entire 250-year span of American literature. Here’s what she wrote:

Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)

In high school Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was a basketball star. Now 26, he is trapped in the comfortable disappointments of postwar suburbia: a deadening sales job selling MagiPeelers, a marriage to an alcoholic and a nagging sense that life has passed him by. So Rabbit runs, gets lost and ends up returning to his home town to live with a former prostitute. What follows is one of the great American quests for freedom, rendered in prose of extraordinary beauty and precision. Updike brings to ordinary lives the attentiveness once reserved for kings and heroes, finding poetry, desire and spiritual yearning in every detail. He can make the mundane shimmer. The first in a tetralogy chronicling Rabbit’s life across four decades, this begins an unrivalled portrait of postwar America, turning the life of a drifting former basketball star into one of the defining stories of the 20th century.

Updike, whose father once walked a Fourth of July parade dressed as Uncle Sam, as did his hero, Rabbit, this latest honor would have been icing on the USA 250th anniversary cake.

From the Updike Casitas: Pietrzyk shares a short story

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Leslie Pietrzyk, the 2025 John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellow, shared a link to a short story she wrote during her 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.

Pietrzyk was working on her proposed project, 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.”

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.

Here is the link to the short story, which was published in New Ohio Review, and a link to more information about the John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship and other grants and awards available from The John Updike Society.

Author talks about Ipswich, Updike, and her ‘Couples’-inspired novel

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Jenny Jackson is vice president and editorial director of fiction at Alfred A. Knopf, but that’s not her only connection to John Updike. As she wrote in a June 30, 2026 piece in Book Riot, “I grew up in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a seaside town north of Boston famous for three things: beer, clams, and John Updike.

“The celebrated author wrote his biggest books, including the Rabbit novels, while living on East Street, a few blocks from my house. Ipswich is a small town, and Updike was very much a celebrity in the midst, winning every major literary prize, appearing on the cover of Life magazine, and regularly contributing to the New Yorker.

“But he wasn’t a reclusive star; instead, he was enmeshed in the social fabric of the town, playing volleyball with a big gang of friends, parenting his small children alongside a dozen other couples, and conducting messy extramarital affairs with a few of them.”

Jackson said The Shampoo Effect was inspired by Couples and, in fact, asks the question, What would Updike’s steamy 1968 novel be like if it were published today, gossip in an era of cell phones and social media? Read the entire article.

Jackson also wrote a piece for Literary Hub (“Jenny Jackson on the Literary Potential of Gossip”) in which she identified a second , “The second inspiration for The Shampoo Effect came from a less literary (but equally Massachusetts) fixation. In 2007, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady famously had a baby with the actress Bridget Moynahan while dating the supermodel Gisele Bundchen. Brady and Bridget Moynahan were no longer together, and he was with Gisele by the time Bridget realized she was pregnant. It was a tabloid sensation, a love triangle that paid salaries across Us Weekly and Page Six. So, these two gossipy scandals tangled together in my mind to become a novel.” Read the entire article.

In Memoriam: Alexander Bernhard

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We regret to report the passing of Alexander Alfred Bernhard, who died in Boston at the age of 89 on June 15, 2026. Though Alexander was not known personally by The John Updike Society, members certainly knew of him. He and first wife Martha Bernhard, who would become Updike’s second wife, were part of the couples group that Updike wrote about in his 1968 bestselling novel Couples. Bernhard’s first marriage and the children produced were not mentioned in the obituary, nor was a second marriage to Joyce Harrington, who was part of another couple from those Ipswich years.

According to the obituary, Bernhard led a “peripatetic life,” attending high school in Mexico City, graduating from MIT in 1957, serving in the US Navy with the majority of time spent in the submarine force, and eventually settling on a career in law after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1964—just four years before the publication of Updike’s scandalous novel. After a stint as clerk for the 9th circuit of the US Court of Appeals in San Francisco, Bernhard settled into a career as a corporate lawyer at Hale & Dorr (now Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr) in Boston for 32 years. “He had a profound sense of community and was active with many nonprofit organizations,” the obituary noted. In 2004, he and his wife, Myra, founded The Friends of the Northern Rail Trail, which “successfully converted the abandoned Boston and Maine train line from Concord, NH to Lebanon, NH into a year-round walking and biking trail.”

The society offers its deepest sympathies to his surviving wife, Myra, three sons, and seven grandchildren.

Boswell receives Updike Society distinguished service award

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Since the society incorporated as a 501c3, Marshall Boswell, an English professor at Rhodes College, has been writing out checks (10-15 per month) and following up with phone calls to square things when a check wasn’t received or when there was some other problem. Each year he also collects information and prepares the checkbook to give to the society’s accountant at tax time. Because people are always in need of being reimbursed and bills always needing to be paid on time, he even takes the checkbook with him when he goes on vacation.

It’s a time-consuming job that Marshall has done faithfully without complaint for more than two decades, and for that the society board voted to present him with The John Updike Society Distinguished Service Award, an honor reserved for those who have assisted the society in important ways and donated a great deal of themselves, their time, their expertise, and in some cases, their financial support.

The award was to have been presented at the Roth-Updike Conference in New York City last October, but a family emergency kept Marshall from attending. Hence, it was presented to him on May 21, 2026 at the society’s annual business meeting, held at The Palmer House in Chicago during the 37th Annual American Literature Association Conference. Well done, Prof. Boswell!

Pictured in the background is society vice-president James Schiff, who presented the award.

Updike Society members convene in Chicago for ALA 2026

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The annual American Literature Association conferences provide an important opportunity for societies devoted to the work of individual American authors to gather, exchange research findings, and discuss issues related to the operation and development of their organizations. This was certainly the case at the conference held in Chicago, May 20-23, 2026.

The John Updike Society organized two sessions. The first session, Looking Back on Updike’s Late Fiction, was held on May 21 and focused on Updike’s novels and short fiction written after 1990. Biljana Dojčinović, Takashi Nakatani, James Schiff, and Peter Bailey presented papers on In the Beauty of the Lilies, Gertrude and Claudius, Terrorist, and “Blue Light,” a story from the posthumously published collection My Father’s Tears, respectively. The session was moderated by Marshall Boswell.

The second session, The Epistles of John: Updike’s Life in Letters, took place on May 22 and centered on Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff and published in October 2025. The discussion explored newly discovered material contained in the letters, as well as the challenges and rewards of collecting, selecting, and editing such a large body of correspondence. Participants included Peter Bailey, Marshall Boswell, James Schiff, and Matthew Shipe. The session was moderated by Biljana Dojčinović, substituting for Sylvie Mathé, who was unable to attend the conference.

At the business meeting of The John Updike Society, members discussed the division of responsibilities within the Society, possible themes for future issues of The John Updike Review, and matters related to membership dues and obligations. Planning for the next John Updike Society Conference, scheduled to take place in Salem in April 2027, was also an important topic of discussion.

In addition, James Schiff participated in A Roundtable on Mentoring and the Future of Author Societies, organized by The Philip Roth Society. All members of The John Updike Society attending the conference took part in this session, alongside representatives of the Hemingway Society, the Mark Twain Circle, and other author societies.

Participants noted that many literary societies face similar challenges, particularly with regard to membership numbers and member engagement, as well as the dissemination and recognition of scholarly work. Several proposals for addressing these issues were discussed, including the organization of multiple online meetings throughout the year based on pre-circulated materials, which would encourage greater participation and ongoing scholarly exchange.

 

Original Magazines places Updike at the forefront of generational change

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In “From Bedtime Stories to Cultural Struggles: Updike’s Domestic Lens,” Original Magazines examines an Updike short story that appeared in The New Yorker, “Should Wizard Hit Mommy?”

The article called Updike’s literary snapshot of a bedtime ritual happening all across America “The Suburban Calm Before the Storm” and “The Story That Keeps Asking Questions.”

“The New Yorker had evolved far beyond its origins as a humor magazine. By the late 1950s, it had become the most prestigious launchpad in American letters—a place where fiction wasn’t decoration but dissection. J.D. Salinger had already used its pages to expose the phoniness beneath polite society. Philip Roth was sharpening his knives. And Updike, still a rising voice, had chosen the most intimate battlefield imaginable: the space between a parent’s authority and a child’s emerging autonomy.

“The magazine knew what it was doing. Sophistication and subversion, wrapped in the same elegant package.”

The article continued, “In Updike’s story, Jack—the father—spins nightly tales for his daughter Jo. The ritual should be simple: father narrates, child listens, sleep follows. But Jo has developed opinions. When Jack’s story about Roger Skunk ends with the creature’s mother insisting he keep his foul smell rather than the roses the wizard gave him, Jo rebels. She wants the wizard to hit the mother. She wants the ending rewritten.

“Jack refuses.

“What follows isn’t violence or melodrama—it’s something more unsettling. A quiet standoff between generations, between the way things have always been done and the way a child thinks they should be. The bedtime story becomes a referendum on authority itself.

“Updike wasn’t writing about skunks and wizards. He was writing about 1959 America, where the next generation was beginning to ask a question their parents found uncomfortable: Why must it be this way?”

The article concluded, “The June 13, 1959 New Yorker didn’t just publish a story about parental authority—it marked the beginning of that authority’s long, slow erosion. Updike’s ‘Should Wizard Hit Mommy?’ remains uncomfortable precisely because it refuses resolution. Jo’s question hangs in the air, unanswered.

“Should the wizard have hit the mommy? Should children obey without understanding? Should tradition survive simply because it’s tradition?

“In 1959, these were bedtime story questions. By 1969, they were revolution.”

Read the whole article.

 

Roger’s Version leaves blogger with mixed feelings

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Thomas Bevilacqua, a Ph.D. who teaches high school English at The Maclay School in Florida, recently posted his reaction to John Updike’s Roger’s Version on his Substack blog:

“It’s pretty clear to me why Roger’s Version is frequently pointed to as one of Updike’s best novels. You see some of the recurring themes from the Rabbit novels—sex, theology, relationships, America—but it’s presented in a more direct or less ponderous way. The two Rabbit novels I’ve read (Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux) are a bit more ground in their historical moment . . . while Roger’s Version is a bit removed from that, though it is obviously and quite pointedly set in the Reagan moment,” Bevilacqua wrote.

The problem, for Bevilacqua, was Updike’s “engagement with, well, sex, to put it bluntly. I don’t think I’m terribly prudish when it comes to what I can read, but I always find how Updike writes about these things to be somewhat strange. Perhaps because they feel so alien relative to everything else he’s writing while someone like Philip Roth makes it feel more central. . . . The entanglements of Roger and Verna as well as Dale and Esther feel shocking, not just because of what is being depicted or considered by how it feels . . . dropped in. I don’t think Updike puts these things in just to shock us, but it feels that way and it drags me as a reader out of the narrative he’s crafted.”

Bevilacqua concluded, “Roger’s Version fits very much in my experience of Updike’s writing—both engrossing but also frustrating, and yet I feel compelled to read more.”

If that compulsion holds, perhaps Bevilacqua might try the other two novels in Updike’s Scarlet Letter trilogy, in which Updike updated and retold Hawthorne’s story of an adulterous triangle from perspective of each of the main characters, starting with the Dimmesdale character (A Month of Sundays, 1975) and ending with the Hester character (S., 1988), with the voyeuristic Roger’s Version falling in the middle (1986).