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Mar 13, 2012 | ISBN 9780345468239 Buy
Feb 12, 1977 | ISBN 9780394410500 Buy
Mar 13, 2012 | ISBN 9780679645771 Buy
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Mar 13, 2012 | ISBN 9780345468239
Feb 12, 1977 | ISBN 9780394410500
Mar 13, 2012 | ISBN 9780679645771
“Brilliant . . . Here is the conflict of real ideas; of real personalities; here is a work of intellectual imagination and great charity. The Poorhouse Fair is a work of art.”—The New York Times Book ReviewThe hero of John Updike’s first novel, published when the author was twenty-six, is ninety-four-year-old John Hook, a dying man who yet refuses to be dominated. His world is a poorhouse—a county home for the aged and infirm—overseen by Stephen Conner, a righteous young man who considers it his duty to know what is best for others. The action of the novel unfolds over a single summer’s day, the day of the poorhouse’s annual fair, a day of escalating tensions between Conner and the rebellious Hook. Its climax is a contest between progress and tradition, benevolence and pride, reason and faith.Praise for The Poorhouse Fair“A first novel of rare precision and real merit . . . a rich poorhouse indeed.”—Newsweek “Turning on a narrow plot of ground, it achieves the rarity of bounded, native truth, and comes forth as microcosm.”—Commonweal
The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike’s first novel, was written in 1957 and published in January of 1959. For this, its sixth printing, the author has appended an introduction discussing the book’s inspiration, its aesthetic sources and models in classics of science fiction, and the way in which its future (projected to be about 1977) compares with the present. The Poorhouse Fair was hailed at the time of its publication as “a rare and beautiful achievement” and “a work of intellectual imagination and great charity.” Though its future has degenerated into our present, and Updike’s later work is better known, such critics as Henry Bech have hailed this little novel as, still, “surely his masterpiece.”
JOHN UPDIKE is the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American… More about John Updike
“A first novel of rare precision and real merit . . . a rich poorhouse indeed.”—Newsweek “Turning on a narrow plot of ground, it achieves the rarity of bounded, native truth, and comes forth as microcosm.”—Commonweal “Brilliant . . . Here is the conflict of real ideas; of real personalities; here is a work of intellectual imagination and great charity. The Poorhouse Fair is a work of art.”—The New York Times Book Review
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