John Updike: American Writer, American Life

Over the course of his six-decade career stretching from the 1950s to 2000s, great American writer and novelist John Updike received praise from countless critics, including Christopher Hitchens, who called his scope “rather breathtaking,” and from Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, who said that Updike “established himself as a major and enduring critical voice; indeed,

John Updike wrote about truth as he imagined the idea and engaged with it in his own life. He believed "God already knows everything and cannot be shocked...only truth, however harsh, is holy." The notion of truth fueled his look into the complexities of life, sometimes beautiful, often messy, and always filled with multitudes.  Updike saw poetry "as the exercise of language a

John Updike was born in Pennsylvania in 1932. Much of his early work, including the famed Rabbit novels and many critically acclaimed short stories were set in the state. Examining Updike's PA roots is important in understanding his development as a writer and how that output shaped his "writerly" life.  I share snippets of a 1983 Updike speech in which he discusses many of th

Before the pandemic turned 2020 into a strange, chaotic mess, I made the decision to read some bit of John Updike's work every single day of the year, whether that turned out to be a few lines or hundreds of pages each day. I can't fully explain why, but the idea primarily came from my need to travel American history with Updike and relish in the beautiful sentences he composed ove