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Twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for novels about Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, John Updike, though very much aware of his gifts and blessings, believed himself to be, like Rabbit, an everyman— ‘a relatively fortunate American male’—and his life a specimen life, ‘representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world.’ This belief animated his more than sixty autobiographical books—fiction, poetry, collections of first-person essays and memoirs—a body of creative work universal in its literary appeal but intimately based upon, as Updike himself called it, ‘this massive datum that happens to be mine.’

Now, more than a decade after his death, comes a generous volume of letters both personal and professional. We see, at last, Updike in ‘real time,’ documenting with preternatural facility every stage of his unspooling life, from Pennsylvania farm boy to Harvard scholarship student, from young father negotiating his first book contract to freelance writer revelling in the ‘post-Pill paradise’ of the swinging 1960s.

Here too are letters to fellow practitioners of the writer’s craft including Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, John Barth, and Ian McEwan. Central to the collection are dozens of letters to Updike’s mother, the aspiring novelist Linda Grace Hoyer, who modelled for him the life of a writer and was, until her death in 1989, his closest confidante. But the most moving, perhaps, are the letters of Updike’s final year—farewells to his children, to colleagues and friends, and to a world that, in his letters as much as in every other form of writing he practiced, he had daily strived to give its ‘beautiful due.’

The arc of literary giant John Updike's life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors, and lovers — a remarkable outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final daysIn the words of his contemporary, Philip Roth, John Updike was ‘Our time’s greatest man of letters – as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short-story writer’. Over the course of his long and immensely productive career, he also proved himself a brilliant correspondent, his letters filled with comic observations, opinions and personal news, told in his characteristically elegant and exquisitely fluid style. In this sparkling selection of his letters, edited by James Schiff, we can see Updike in real time, capturing every stage of his unspooling life, from Pennsylvania farm boy to Pulitzer prizewinner; and from young father negotiating his first book contract to the bestselling writer he became, following the international success of his novels Couples and the ‘Rabbit ‘sequence. Here are letters to family, friends, editors and lovers, a remarkable outpouring over six decades – including, most movingly perhaps, the letters of his final year bidding farewell to children, colleagues and friends. Taken together, these missives make a page-turning ‘life in letters’ like no other – an intimate testament to one of the greatest of all American writers. ‘Nobody has a better understanding of the capriciousness of the human heart than John Updike’ Daily Telegraph‘He was the ideal son of a platonic union between John Cheever and J.D. Salinger, with Nabokov attending the christening as fairy godfather’ James Wood‘John Updike mapped our desires, our wishes, our wise and unwise dreams, our uncertainties, with such elegant precision and for so many years’ The Times

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A Life in Letters

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