on. He remained there for seventeen years. The move cut him off from the world of the New York literati, a move that was considered risky for a young author. However, it proved to be a good idea. He rented an office over an Ipswich restaurant and wrote on a daily schedule, selling stories to the New Yorker and working on longer fiction. His first book was published in 1958, a collection of poems called The Carpentered Hen, and in 1959 he published The Poorhouse Fair, a mildly futuristic novel about an old people's home set in a fictionalized version of Shillington. While the poetry collection was largely ignored, but the novel was favorably reviewed and won the Rosenthal Award. The Same Door was published in 1959, Updike's first short-story collection.
One of the themes that recurs in Updike's work derives from his own religious-philosophical crisis during these years in Ipswich:
He himself identified this malaise, which persisted for a number of years during his late twenties, as a feeling of hopelessness prompted by his recognition of the inevitability of death. Reading the works of existentialist-oriented thinkers such as Kierkega
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