Selected Letters of John Updike by John Updike

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Selected Letters of John Updike

Name: Selected Letters of John Updike
Price: 19.99 USD
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Author: John Updike
ISBN: 9780593801550

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Published on Oct 21, 2025 | 912 Pages

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Published on Oct 21, 2025 | 912 Pages

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • 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—enabling him to thrive in both short fiction and the novel, criticism as well as poetry—Updike was also a consummate letter writer. When barely a teenager, he began submitting poems and cartoons to national magazines and soliciting famous cartoonists, with flattering requests, for a drawing. His letter writing only increased when he left the family farm in Pennsylvania for Harvard, where he composed more than 150 witty, substantive letters to his parents. The summer after he graduated, The New Yorker began accepting his work, and his exchanges with editors, publishers, and writers would stretch into a correspondence that, 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 manner 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 his Ipswich neighbor, Martha, who became his second wife; the concern for his children’s path to adulthood; and the conversations with many literary peers, from Joyce Carol Oates to Philip Roth, as well as his Knopf and New Yorker editors, critics, translators, and others in the lit business.

Filled with comic observations, opinions, and personal news, told in the fluid first-person voice of the writer himself, these missives, taken together, create a page-turning “life in letters” like no other.

One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year
One of the Wall Street Journal’s Best Books of the Fall

“What an enormous and beneficent bounty these letters are for anyone who cares about this country’s literature during the last half century. . . . Come for the gossip. . . . Come for the love letters. . . . Come to watch him cope with the aftermath of fame. . . . Updike’s letters sing because he cared so intensely about getting the words right.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Witness the rapid ascent of the poor kid from Plowville, Pennsylvania, to Harvard and beyond. . . . [Updike’s] facility with details foreshadows the ease with which prose came to him as a novelist, the lapidary, graceful sentences that flowed and flowed. . . . As with his novels, the experience takes time to cohere, but when it does, one realizes Updike has built, line by line, an enclosed world. In these letters, as in his fiction, he never stopped trying to make life look composed, even as it came apart. . . . I felt a gratitude toward Updike at the end of this book that exceeded the feelings upon concluding one of his stories or novels.” —Thomas Beller, Airmail

“[Updike’s letters] have the repleteness of his fiction, the springy, unexpected notice of the smallest particulars. This huge volume is readable in a way that too many collections of writers’ letters, however useful to scholarly research, simply are not. Lovely flourishes remind us of Updike’s talent for light verse. . . [his] tenderness, a natural instinct for conciliation, always re-emerges. . . . These letters make plain [his] ability to marvel and thank [and the] willingness to take America to his bosom. . . that guarantees his permanent place in this country’s literature.” —Thomas Mallon, The Wall Street Journal

“Magnificent. . . . A profoundly poignant portrait, an invaluable historical document, and a timely reflection on the eternal tensions between societal conventions and free speech. The selection has been deftly edited by James Schiff. . . . Among Schiff’s many judicious interventions are an excellent introduction and the reproduction of some of Updike’s letters, postcards, telegrams and drawings. . . . Done this well, epistolary biography comes to seem the best and most honorable kind.” —Lisa Halliday, The Telegraph

“In the aggregate, Updike’s letters could constitute the outline for a never-published Updike novel. . . . Updike is, as ever, captivating on the page.” —Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic

“Wonderfully copious. . . . 130 pages [here] are devoted to Updike’s agonizing extrication from his first marriage. They are so detailed and so attuned to the author’s alternating currents of grief and infatuation that they feel like a novella of sorts. . . . Updike simply had it: an instinctive feeling for the shape of American sentences, for the murmuring music of nouns and verbs and the way they could pin reality to the page.” —James Marcus, The New Stateman

“Brilliant: riveting and essential for anyone remotely interested in Updike; shockingly salacious enough to enthrall the remotely curious; and cleverly annotated for easy reading. . . . You realize that Updike’s greatness as a writer lies not in his much-lauded descriptive powers, nor in his ability to weave arcane areas of computer science or theology into his fiction, but in his ruthlessly honest psychological acuity, as he lays himself bare.” —David Mills, The Times [London]

“An epistolary account of much of Updike’s life, which follows him through childhood, college, his literary career, his relationship with this magazine, his two marriages, fatherhood, multiple affairs, and more. The result is an inadvertent self-portrait, written with wit and grace. Updike maintains a certain ebullient positivity, even in his darker moments.” —The New Yorker

“John Updike had . . . the prose style of a literary genius. . . . Incapable of writing a bad sentence.” —John Banville, The Guardian

“The old cliché of never being at a loss for words is evident on every page of these letters, and they match perfectly with the behavior of Updike the novelist. . . . James Schiff’s editorial guidance, here and everywhere, is clarifying, always helpful and refusing to take sides. . . . Both extensive in fullness and unfailingly perceptive in critical viewpoint, this edition is a model of what such an edition should be.” —William Pritchard, The Hudson Review

“It should come as no surprise that Updike was as expansive, candid, and prolix in his personal correspondence as he was in his writing for publication and for pay. The superb, revelatory Selected Letters of John Updike gives an indication of the eagerness with which Updike wrote to friends, family members, both his wives, countless editors, and even the occasional critic. . . . [His] letters commemorate and valorize everyday existence with as much vigor as his fiction.” —Peter Tonguette, The American Conservative

“Missives from the mountain. . . . A sprightly and revealing collection by the writer who captured postwar American life, love, and loss.” —Kirkus Reviews

Author

John Updike

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 Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009.

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Selected Letters of John Updike

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By John UpdikeEdited by James Schiff