John Updike (1932-2009). Biography and Creativity

The old anecdote goes like this: Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio, met a young aspiring author named William Faulkner while both were living in New Orleans. At the time, Faulkner was struggling to find his voice. Anderson advised him to return to Mississippi and to write about the world that he knew: to find his own little postage stamp. In this same tradition, much of John Updike’s own writing bares the transparency of his own life and experiences.

Generally regarded as one of 20th-century America’s greatest men of letters, John Hoyer Updike, born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 1932, was the only child of Wesley Russell Updike and Linda Grace Hoyer Updike. They lived with John’s maternal grandparents at 117 Philadelphia Avenue, in Shillington, a suburb of Reading. Updike attended Shillington High School, from which he graduated as senior class president and co-valedictorian in 1950.

While he was in ninth grade, his family moved to the farmhouse originally owned by the Hoyers, 11 miles south of Shillington in Plowville. This move, and Updike’s subsequent boredom, are recorded in the short story “The Brown Chest” (1992). While in high school, Updike developed his interest in drawing and writing. He contributed 285 drawings, articles, and poems to the Shillington High School Chatterbox.

A life in Shillington, however, was not meant to be for Updike. In Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, a young aspiring writer named George Willard realizes that if he is to be a great writer, he must leave the small town of Winesburg. While his father earns a living in Winesburg, his mother encourages George to leave town to realize his ambition. Updike’s situation paralleled the fictional life of George Willard. In “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington” Updike writes, “My avenging mission beckoned. Shillington in my mother’s vision was small town—small minds, small concerns, small hopes. We were above all that, though my father drew a living from it” (37-38). Yet he would draw upon Shillington and his memories of it numerous times in his works.

Updike notes in his memoirs, Self-Consciousness (1989), that several circumstances led him to be a writer. First, writing was his mother Linda’s passion, and she strongly encouraged John to enter the profession she desired. Additionally, Updike suffered from psoriasis and stuttering. The psoriasis contributed to his writer’s discipline, and his prodigious volume of work was a response to his speech problems. These conditions caused Updike to become a prodigious reader, as well. The move to the farm in Plowville also gave John the motivation to entertain himself with books.

In 1950 he entered Harvard University on a tuition scholarship and studied English. During his first year at Harvard he wrote poems and contributed drawings for the Harvard Lampoon. During his senior year Updike was named editor of the Harvard Lampoon. On Updike 26, he married Mary Pennington, a Radcliffe fine arts student. Mary’s father was a minister of the First Unitarian Church in Hyde Park, Chicago, and would be the inspiration, both personally and theologically, for several Updike characters.

Updike graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954. He won a Knox Fellowship for his thesis, “Non-Horatian Elements in Robert Herrick’s Imitations and Echoes of Horace,” which enabled him to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford. While at Oxford, Updike met Katharine and E. B. White. Katharine, who was the fiction editor of the New Yorker magazine, offered him a job at the magazine. In 1955 the Updikes returned to New York and John became a “Talk of the Town” reporter.

In 1957 the Updikes moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, and in 1958 Harper and Brothers published his first book, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (a collection of 55 poems). His first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, and first collection of stories, The Same Door, were both published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1959, marking the beginning of a long publishing relationship that continues to this day. He also won a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to write Rabbit, Run. His short story “A Gift from the City” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 1959.

The following year, Knopf published Updike’s most famous novel, Rabbit, Run. Set in a fictionalized version of Reading, Pennsylvania, known as Brewer, Rabbit, Run is one of many stories in which Updike draws from his childhood, in setting or experience. His Olinger stories, collected in one volume in 1964, are set in a fictionalized Shillington, Pennsylvania. For many of his stories and novels the settings will ostensibly be either Reading, Pennsylvania, or greater New England. This connects him with many American writers who draw upon their sense of place as the foundation for their works. His essay “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington” recollects his early years in Shillington and is set during a midlife return to his hometown, when Updike reflects upon the changes along the main street and reminiscences about its place in his fiction.

In the late 1950s, Updike began reading several theologians, including S0ren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, whose theology would play a significant role in many of Updike’s works, beginning with the theological debate in Rabbit, Run. Barth sees God as “inconceivable,” in that humans cannot recognize God unless God reveals himself first. God cannot be found “in the pantheon of human piety and religious inventive skill”: He is remote from human consciousness and can be witnessed only through his acts, most notably in the presence of Jesus Christ. Like God, “Heaven is the creation inconceivable to man.”

Barth claims that man is at the boundary between heaven and Earth. Both physically and spiritually humans are bound by their own mortality, and the human landscape represents these limits. For Updike, the landscape represents the extent to which people can unify the physical with the spiritual. The horizon represents the edge of human vision, and what lies beyond the horizon is the product of the narrator’s imagination. On a textual level, Updike seeks the ability to unify the body and soul.

While the theme of adultery is present in Rabbit, Run, the significance of this theme in Updike’s writing began to take shape in the mid-1960s. After a passionate love affair and the contemplation of divorce in 1962, Updike’s writing began a period of emphasis on adultery and its consequences. In 1963 he wrote the short story “Couples,” which would be developed into the 1968 novel, and was composing the first drafts of Marry Me, which would be published in 1976. His stories and poems of this period brooded over the effects and consequences of adultery. Many, including the short story “Leaves,” were collected in The Music School in 1966. While adultery would be present in most of Updike’s fiction, the tone that surrounds it emerged in the 1970s as less brooding and more playful, often giving readers the false impression that Updike endorsed adultery.

During the 1960s Updike’s position as a major man of letters in America was taking shape. His novel The Centaur won the National Book Award in 1963, and the following year he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, one of the youngest persons so honored. That same year he received an honorary doctor of letters degree from Ursinus College, the school his mother had attended. In 1966 his story “The Bulgarian Princess” won an O. Henry Prize. In 1968 his novel Couples was published and remained on the bestseller list for a year.

He also appeared on the cover of Time magazine, as the subject of the cover story, “The Adulterous Society.” His story “Your Lover Just Called” was included in O. Henry Prize Stories 1968. Later that year the Updikes moved to London to avoid the Vietnam War protests. While there, Updike began researching President James Buchanan, the only president from Pennsylvania. Buchanan would become the subject of two works: the play Buchanan Dying (1974) and the novel Memories of the Ford Administration (1992).

In 1970 Updike published Bech: A Book, the first of three works about Updike’s fictional alter ego, Henry Bech. The three volumes (including Bech Is Back, 1982, and Bech at Bay, 1998) are short story cycles, in the same tradition as Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio or James Joyce’s Dubliners. The following year, the second Rabbit novel, Rabbit Redux, was published, and Updike won the Signet Society Medal for Achievement in the Arts.

In 1975 the tour-de-force novel A Month of Sun-days was published. It is the first of Updike’s Scarlet Letter trilogy, in which he examines each of the three main characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel. Updike’s interest in Hawthorne, while evident in many of his works, presents itself overtly for the first time in A Month of Sundays. James Schiff, in his discussion of Updike’s “retelling” of The Scarlet Letter (A Month of Sundays, Roger’s Version, and S.), suggests that Updike establishes a dialogue with Hawthorne through this retelling. For while Updike’s novels remain true to Hawthorne’s original myth, Updike takes Hawthorne’s novel into the late 20th century to be scrutinized under a postmodern lens.

Each novel in the trilogy offers the perspective of one of the main characters (122-130). However, none of the three novels is a straight retelling of The Scarlet Letter. A Month of Sundays provides Arthur Dimmesdale’s perspective, Roger’s Version (1986) examines the myth through the mind of Roger Chillingworth, and the epistolary S. (1988) offers Hester Prynne’s opinions on the events of The Scarlet Letter. Updike is not so much interested in the story as he is in the issues that constitute “America’s national myth.” As a fellow New Englander and product of Hawthorne’s literary legacy, Updike shares an interest in many of the issues that concerned Hawthorne.

The subjects of adultery and spirituality, as well as the dichotomy between body and soul, are integral components of many of Updike’s novels. Updike was often noted for being the only practicing Christian among America’s premier contemporary writers. His Christian spirituality is evident in most of his writings, often juxtaposed with the physical subjects of adultery and sex. The dilemma of the matter/spirit dichotomy no doubt troubled Updike, who once claimed, “Matter and spirit are inevitably at war.” To understand this dilemma he turns to Hawthorne. Through a dialogue with Hawthorne, Updike attempts to reconcile matter and spirit in terms of both literary plot and literary structure.

Updike and his wife, Mary, separated in 1974, and he moved into an apartment in Boston. The slow disintegration of their marriage is chronicled in the stories of Richard and Joan Maples (collected in Too Far to Go, 1979). As do the Maples, John and Mary Updike received a “no-fault” divorce in 1976. The following year he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard. Also in 1976, Marry Me: A Romance was published and Updike was elected to the 50-member American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Rabbit Is Rich, the third novel about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, was published in 1981 and received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and the American Book Award for fiction. Updike also received the Edward MacDowell Medal for literature. The 1980s saw Updike win several awards, and he continued writing at a prodigious rate, publishing a book a year, including six novels, by the end of the decade.

Later years found Updike “tidying up his desk,” so to speak. This period began with his memoirs, Self-Consciousness (1989), and much of his stories and fiction reflects his sense of himself as aging. Whereas the younger Updike often did not write about old age and death, the older Updike saw the proximity of death very clearly. Indeed, death is Harry Angstrom’s preoccupation in Rabbit at Rest (1990).

John Updike died on January 27, 2009. At his death, he had published nearly 60 books, including novels, collections of stories, poems, criticism, children’s books, and a play. His most recent novel, Terrorist, was published in October 2006.