{"id":6528,"date":"2025-02-09T08:41:17","date_gmt":"2025-02-09T14:41:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=6528"},"modified":"2025-04-11T12:39:28","modified_gmt":"2025-04-11T17:39:28","slug":"release-date-announced-for-selected-letters-of-john-updike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2025\/02\/09\/release-date-announced-for-selected-letters-of-john-updike\/","title":{"rendered":"Release date announced for Selected Letters of John Updike"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Knopf, now a division of Penguin-Random House, just released cover art for\u00a0Selected Letters of John Updike<\/em>, edited by Updike scholar and John Updike Society vice-president James Schiff. The hefty hardcover (900 pages) is roughly 6×9″ and slated for October 21, 2025 release. A book release event and signing will be scheduled as part of the joint Roth-Updike societies’ conference in New York City, Oct. 19-22. Those who plan on attending should count on getting a copy in NYC.<\/p>\n

From the Penguin-Random House website<\/a>, which offers purchase links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, Hudson Booksellers, Powell’s, Target, and Walmart:<\/p>\n

“The arc of literary giant John Updike\u2019s life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors and lovers\u2014a remarkable outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final days<\/p>\n

“As James Schiff writes in the introduction to this volume, of the writer who would eventually express himself in written form as copiously and as elegantly as any American writer before him, ‘Updike needed to write the way the rest of us need to breathe or eat.’ With his stunning rhetorical gifts\u2014allowing him to thrive in both fiction and nonfiction, in criticism as well as poetry\u2014he was also a consummate letter writer. From his early writing attempts (he began submitting work to magazines as a teenager) to the 150 eye-opening letters home when he left the farm and family to go to Harvard, to the young adult correspondence with The New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>and other publications where his work began to appear, and on into the fullness of a long literary life, his correspondence, Schiff notes,’figures not as an adjunct to but rather an integral part of his astonishing literary output.’<\/p>\n

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“The intimacy and lucidity of these letters brings to the fore all matter of subjects and situations, notably the ardent feelings for his first love and wife, Mary, and later the heartbreaking but honestly accounted breakup of their marriage; the uncensored passion for other women, including the neighbor and friend of the Updikes who became his second wife; the concern for his children\u2019s path to adulthood; and the ongoing conversations with many literary peers, from Joyce Carol Oates to Philip Roth, as well as Knopf and New Yorker editors, publicists, and others in the lit business.”Filled with comic observations, opinions, and personal news, told in the exquisitely fluid first-person voice of the writer himself, these missives, taken together, make a page-turning ‘life in letters’ like no other.”<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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