Selected Letters of John Updike John Updike Author

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE · The arc of literary giant John Updikeâ s life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors, and loversâ 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 â express himself in written form as copiously and as elegantly as any American writerâ before him, â Updike needed to write the way the rest of us need to breathe or eat.â With his stunning rhetorical giftsâ enabling him to thrive in both short fiction and the novel, criticism as well as poetryâ 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, â figures not as an adjunct to but rather an integral part of his astonishing literary output.â 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 childrenâ 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 â life in lettersâ like no other.