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BACKGROUND
- small town
(Shillington, PA)
- only child
- father = junior-high math teacher
- mother = writer, ambitious
- schooling:
- 8 y.o. = wrote first short story
- honor student
- editor of school paper
- president of senior class
- Harvard University (mother’s choice – thought it made
good writers)
- 1954 =
- editor of school paper (The Lampoon editor,
writer, artist)
- graduates Harvard (summa cum laude)
- sold 1st short story to the New Yorker
- year fellowship studying art in England
- (graphic artist, cartoonist = unrealized goal)
- 1955 =
- staff writer @ New Yorker
- 1950s-1960s: established his reputation as a
writer of short fiction here
- 1950s-death = regular contributor
- poems, essays, sketches, short stories, & reviews
- dubbed “The Brilliant Young
Writer”
- Did he fulfill this early promise?
- 1957 =
- left New Yorker
- moved to Ipswich, Mass
- became independent writer
- 1958 =
- 1st book The Carpentered Hen (poetry collection)
- 1959 =
- 1st novel Poorhouse Fair
- 1st short story collection The Same Door
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BACKGROUND
- became “one of the most
American writers in modern American literature”
- novels, articles, reviews, opera libretto,
- play, memoirs (1980’s Self-Consciousness)
- 1963 =
- critical success w/ Centaur
- highly allusive, symbolic novel
- National Book Award
- 1968 =
- 1st widespread recognition, commercial
success/popularity, infamy (?) w/ Couples
- salacious novel
- compulsive adulteries
- 1978 =
- “Olinger stories”
- fictitious Pennsylvania town
- similar to Shillington
- “Rabbit novels”
- Rabbit Run (1960)
- Rabbit Redux (1971)
- Rabbit Is Rich (1981)
- Rabbit at Rest (1990)
- The Witches of Eastwick (1984)
- S (1988) = rework of Scarlet Letter
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THEMES
- UPDIKE’S AMERICA:
- mundane world
- of middle-class, lower-class materialism
- land of sterile, empty, trivial lives
- centered on TV, movies, fan mags for riff-raff
- brand-name America
- whose inhabitants are sunk in installment buying
- whose stomachs are bloated w/franchised food
- whose minds are dulled by soap operas & trashy
newspapers
- characters =
- searching for spirituality & religious meaning in life
- BUT
- find love = trap, deceit
- happiness = brief
- life = dull
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THEMES
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STYLE
- “To transcribe middleness
with all its grit, bumps, and anonymities, in its fullness
of satisfaction and mystery”
- (Updike, memoir, The Dogwood Tree)
- one’s spirit takes on its coloration from the
material circumstances (houses, clothes, landscape,
food, parents) one is bounded by
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STYLE
- (+)
- elegant prose
- balanced, rhythmic sentences
- concern w/ “business of memory”
- explorations of private feelings
- portrays America in all its ugliness BUT still the best
- (-)
- strains for elegance
- suffused w/nostalgia
- mired in childhood
- characters = predictably autobiographical
- puzzled young man
- devoted by dim girlfriend
- strong older woman w/ misplaced enthusiasms
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LINKS
LINKS
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