Selected Letters of John Updike

Selected Letters of John Updike - Hardcover

$55.00
$55.00
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Selected Letters of John Updike
  • Selected Letters of John Updike
Selected Letters of John Updike - Hardcover

Selected Letters of John Updike - Hardcover

by John Updike
$55.00
$55.00

Book Overview

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.
ISBN9780593801543
Author John Updike
PublisherKnopf Publishing Group
GenreBiography and Literature
FormatHardcover
PublishedOctober 2025
LanguageENG- English
Pages912
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Biography & Autobiography Literary Collections Nonfiction

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More by John Updike

Selected Letters of John Updike

Selected Letters of John Updike - Hardcover

Selected Letters of John Updike - Hardcover

By John Updike

About John Updike

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.

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