{"id":1796,"date":"2014-01-14T07:12:19","date_gmt":"2014-01-14T13:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=1796"},"modified":"2014-01-15T06:07:04","modified_gmt":"2014-01-15T12:07:04","slug":"a-look-inside-adam-begleys-updike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2014\/01\/14\/a-look-inside-adam-begleys-updike\/","title":{"rendered":"A look inside Adam Begley’s UPDIKE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amazon.com usually offers a “look inside” so you can see the Table of Contents of a book or read an excerpt, but they haven’t done that yet for Adam Begley’s forthcoming (April 8) biography of John Updike. So we thought we’d provide that service. A review will come later, but for now, here’s a peek inside Updike<\/em><\/strong>, which will be published by HarperCollins:<\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong>
\nIntroduction
\nI. A Tour of Berks County
\nII. The Harvard Years
\nIII. The Talk of the Town
\nIV. Welcome to Tarbox
\nV. The Two Iseults
\nVI. Couples
\nVII. Updike Abroad
\nVIII. Tarbox Redux
\nIX. Marrying Martha
\nX. Haven Hill
\nXI. The Lonely Fort
\nXII. Endpoint
\nNotes
\nCredits
\nAcknowledgments
\nIndex<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a>The book runs 576 pages, with a 6×9 trim size and a 16-page black-and-white photo insert. Blurbs are from Joyce Carol Oates (“A beautifully written, richly detailed, and warmly sympathetic portrait of a great American writer”), Stacy Schiff (“Adam Begley has done him proud, offering up Updike the man and Updike the writer in an exuberant, stunningly choreographed pas de deux”), Francine Prose (“Adam Begley’s Updike<\/em> is a model of what a literary biography should be . . .”), Ann Beattie (“\u2026a social history in which one man’s heart, mind, and talent came to resonate with an entire society”), and Janet Malcolm (“Adam Begley tells the story of John Updike’s life in art with brilliant tautness, as if he were writing a novel”).<\/p>\n

From a discussion of Rabbit, Run<\/em> in the “Welcome to Tarbox”chapter:<\/p>\n

“It’s possible that the cuts were unnecessary, that no legal challenge would have been forthcoming. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita<\/em> had been published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1958, attracting considerable controversy but no prosecutions; by January of 1959, Lolita<\/em> had reached the top spot on the New York Times<\/em> bestseller list. In July of 1959, the U.S. Post Office ban on the unexpurgated Grove Press edition of Lady Chatterly’s Lover<\/em> was overturned in federal court, and Lawrence’s novel also climbed the bestseller list. But two years later, when Grove published an American edition of Henry Miller’s previously banned Tropic of Cancer<\/em>, dozens of booksellers were arrested and obscenity cases filed coast to coast. In a bizarre twist, as if to fulfill Knopf’s dark prophecy, charges of conspiracy were filed in a Brooklyn court against both the publisher, Barney Rosser, and Henry Miller himself; when Miller declined to appear before the grand jury, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. Neither man went to jail, and in any case Tropic of Cancer<\/em> is a much bawdier book; it’s deliberately, even gleefully salacious in a way Rabbit, Run<\/em> isn’t. (“The novels of Henry Miller,” Updike once quipped, are not novels, they are acts of intercourse strung alternately with segments of personal harangue”). Yet Updike, in this uncertain climate, was perhaps wise to conclude that self-censorship was preferable to state censorship.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amazon.com usually offers a “look inside” so you can see the Table of Contents of a book or read an excerpt, but they haven’t done that yet for Adam Begley’s forthcoming (April 8) biography of John Updike. So we thought … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1796"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1804,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1796\/revisions\/1804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}