“I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing... as a mode of truth telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. ”John Updike in his 2005 NPR This I Believe essay "Testing the Limits of What I Know and Feel"
On January 27, novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic John Hoyer Updike put down his pen forever. Through his 76 years, he was a prolific writer, publishing more than twenty-five novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. He received Pulitzers for his books Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.
The Washington Post hails him as a "prolific chronicler of small-town angst" who wrote "finely polished novels and stories exploring the virtues, vices and spent hopes of America's small towns and suburbs." The New York Times describes him as "endowed with an art student’s pictorial imagination, a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor" and "this country’s one true all-around man of letters."
This amazing man touched many. Today, The New Yorker published Updike tributes from George Saunders, Antonya Nelson, Paul Theroux and more. He published hundreds of stories, reviews, and poems in the magazine, starting in 1954.
As a way of saying farewell to an American icon. Get Lit! wants to know, what is your favorite Updike piece? Did he or his work influence your writing, reading, thinking, or living? Let us know.
2 comments:
"How To Love America And Leave It At The Same Time"
I've always loved this little story, first published in the August 19th, 1972 New Yorker.
Captures the American road trip in an understated second person, and moves seamlessly from cultural ideas to narrative. Excellent.
-Ross Carper
"A&P" has always been been favorite John Updike short story.
I have no clue where it was first published. I had to read it in high school. As a sophomore, I only knew John Updike's name from those big books my pops read.
But I will always love that story for the phrase, "the two smoothest scoops of vanilla..." Brilliant.
-Brent Schaeffer
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