Selected Letters of John Updike

About Selected Letters of John Updike

The arc of literary giant John Updike’s life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors, and lovers—a remarkable outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final days.

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—allowing him to thrive in both fiction and nonfiction, in criticism as well as poetry—he 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 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.”

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’s path to adulthood; and the ongoing conversations with many literary peers, from Joyce Carol Oates to Philip Roth, as well as Knopf and The 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.