{"id":3315,"date":"2016-03-18T11:22:13","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T16:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=3315"},"modified":"2016-03-18T11:22:13","modified_gmt":"2016-03-18T16:22:13","slug":"the-writers-almanac-remembers-updikes-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2016\/03\/18\/the-writers-almanac-remembers-updikes-birthday\/","title":{"rendered":"The Writer’s Almanac remembers Updike’s birthday"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Updikecropped150\"<\/a>Garrison Keillor<\/strong>, who will be the keynote speaker at this fall’s Fourth Biennial John Updike Society Conference at the University of South Carolina, today paid tribute to John Updike on what would have been the author’s\u00a084th birthday.<\/p>\n

In “Mar. 18, 2016: birthday: John Updike,”<\/a> Keillor recalls\u00a0Updike’s early ambitions to be a cartoonist, his love affair with Pennsylvania, and the novel that brought him national attention.<\/p>\n

When Updike died, he was hailed as America’s last great man of letters, but did he write any books that will be considered “a classic” years from now?<\/p>\n

In “The Disappearance of Literature,” Mark Twain lamented, “A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” Echoing that, in Rite of Passage<\/em>\u00a0Alexei Panshin wrote, “Classics aren’t books that are read for pleasure. Classics are books that are imposed on unwilling students, books that are subjected to analyses of ‘levels of significance’ and other blatt, books that are dead.” That implies it’s the “academy” that confers the title of “classic,” and if such is the case, it’s worth considering how Updike fares among overlapping contemporaries when it comes to number of articles written by academics and indexed in the International MLA Bibliography. The list below isn’t all-inclusive, but\u00a0it features writers who have inspired at least 500 articles:<\/p>\n