John Updike, 1932-2009

JANUARY 27, 2009 TAGS: BOOKS, WRITERS, NOVELS, INTELLECTUALS ADD A COMMENT

- The New York Times' expansive obit describes a body of work, "so vast, protean and lyrical as to place [Updike] in the first rank of American authors."

- Book Critic, Michiko Kakutani's appraisal identifies Updike's "blogger-like...determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words."

-From the Boston Globe: "[Updike], whose jeweled prose and quicksilver intellect made him for decades one of America’s foremost literary figures," was an adopted son of the North Shore. He described Fenway Park as a "'a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark,” in Mr. Updike’s classic account of Ted Williams’ final game, 'Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.'"

- Six essential works by John Updike. Compiled by Amherst College Professor and author of Updike, America's Man of Letters, William Pritchard, also from the Boston Globe.

- The New Yorker brings forward three Updike essays from their pages, including his piece on bidding Ted Williams farewell at Fenway Park, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," from 1960.

- From the Paris Review Interiew, 1968:

INTERVIEWER You seem to shun literary society. Why?

UPDIKE I don’t, do I? Here I am, talking to you. In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering. Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.

- New York magazine finds Updike's shorter works more satisfying, more essentially Updike.

"his talent could also be very small, in the best possible way. I always go back, first, to his essays, which strike me as the purest expression of his personality: easy, sociable, curious, smart, funny, generous, and almost pathologically cheerful. He was, for my money, one of the greatest belletrists of all time — a master of the short, casual, elegant, whimsical, roving piece about absolutely anything...

...Updike’s essays — my favorite collection is Picked-Up Pieces (1975) — are as smart, funny, genial, and stylistically bulletproof as any essays have ever been. They’re so abundant, in fact, so springy and alive, that, reading them, it’s impossible to accept that he’s gone."

- In the pages of U.K.'s The Telegraph, reactions from British authors Ian McEwan and Martin Amis as well as from Philip Roth:

"He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. His death constitutes a loss to our literature that is immeasurable."

- Slate.com presents a gallery of images from Magnum Photos of Updike.