John Updike
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John Updike is one of America's most important writers, adept at both the short story and the novel, and also well-known for his criticism. He was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania and spent his early years with his parents and his mother's parents, who would be the inspiration for the fictional grandparents in stories such as The Centaur. Times were difficult for the family, which moved when John was 13 years old to a farm in Plowville, 10 miles outside of Shillington. John's father was a high school mathematics teacher who commuted with his son to the public schools of Shillington. Updike's mother read widely and wanted to be a writer, and she helped create the atmosphere in which her son's talent flourished. Updike was a good student in his small-town high school and entered Harvard on a full scholarship in 1950, majoring in English. He became editor of the Harvard Lampoon and graduated summa cum laude in 1954. He married in his junior year and sold his first short story, "Friends from Philadelphia," in 1954 to the New Yorker, launching a career that would make him one of the most prolific writers in American literature. There are a number of elements in Updike's life that are reflected in his stories. It is less that there is a one-to-one relationship between events in his life and events in his stories than that the sort of life he leads is reflected in the interests displayed in his stories. Updike early fled from the New York literary scene. He beca
. . .
e little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart."
Updike is not comfortable with criticism or with the celebrity that he fled when he left New York, and he is candid about this in his memoirs:
Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being "somebody," to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer becomes conscious of himself as a writer.
Updike's fiction is very much a fiction of observation, which does not mean that he does not get inside his characters but only that he has observed the real world well and brings it into his fiction through his characters. His novels are often classified as social dissections of modern married life and sexual relations in America, and he does this with a strong sense of the value of the underlying myth juxtaposed with the reality:
John Updike wishes to leave no stone in Eden untur
. . .
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Approximate Word count = 1746
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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