Blessed Man is a tribute to Updike’s tenacious maternal grandmother, Katherine Hoyer, who died in 1955. Inspired by an heirloom, a silver thimble engraved with her initials, a keepsake Katherine gave...
Even more than black death he dreaded the gaudy gate: the mask of sweet red rubber, the violet overhead lights, the rattling ride through washed corridors, the steaming, breathing, percolating apparat...
White encouraged Updike’s equally scrupulous commitment. They bonded over dashes, colons, and commas—most amazingly in an exchange of letters in the last two months of 1954 concerning two poems, The S...
[A]s Norman Mailer pointed out decades ago, and Philip Roth not long afterwards, niceness is the enemy. Every soft stroke from society is like the pfft of an aerosol can as it eats up a few more atoms...
Barth was possibly the less efficacious of the two remedies. A bracingly stringent Calvinist, he did supply Updike with one of the enduring tenets of his personal creed (the idea that God is Wholly Ot...
With his romantic weakness for gags—inherited from his father, along with his talent for pratfalls—Updike was a willing participant in the Lampoon’s elaborately orchestrated social frivolity. During h...
And, most ambitiously, Updike dreamed up an absurdist spectacle (not unlike the drama of the blind cripple and the priests) that drew a large and appreciative lunchtime crowd to a street adjacent to t...
What they love is love and being in love. They are in the grip of