Features
Wednesday, July 22 2009
John Updike: The Final Ornament
Ever the completist, John Updike had managed to finish his life-long project of drawing and connecting the things of his world. A kind of psychic recycler, he never let anything go to waste.
Columns
Friday, April 16 2010
Backyard Fiction a.k.a. the Great American Myth of Suburbia
Suburban discontent in Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, John Updike's Couples and Richard Ford's Independence Day. The idea or myth of suburbia is just as real as the actual shopping centers, schools, etc.
Reviews
Monday, January 28 2013
Re-Rendering in Words What the Artist Rendered in Pigment: 'Always Looking: Essays on Art'
John Updike favored artists who possessed an aesthetic apeal that it was never necessary for viewers to be hectored or intellectually intimidated into admiring. Thus, he explains in hyper-perceptive terms what we already know through our own two eyes.
Wednesday, March 7 2012
Uncollected Collections: John Updike's 'Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism'
With John Updike’s death we lost another old-fashioned intellect, another widely interested, deeply educated writer who moved effortlessly between genres, fluently penning fiction, essays, poetry, and criticism.
Thursday, June 18 2009
Endpoint and Other Poems by John Updike
The last words of John Updike, poet, gazing back at his readers one final time.
Tuesday, December 9 2008
The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike
The novel has enormous vitality and the main characters are memorable, but the moral ambiguity, really moral obliviousness, is disappointing.
Sunday, January 1 1995
Americana and Other Poems by John Updike
Updike's writing and vocabulary place him in rarified air with few peers. In verse, that talent and intellect are featured in what is perhaps their best arena, a place where his razor sharp wit, keen observational eye, and precise writing shine the brightest.
Blogs
Thursday, March 8 2012
Klegg the Drunk: John Updike on Raymond Carver
John Updike the East Coast moral aesthete and Raymond Carver the West Coast drunken Everyman had more in common than met the eye.
Thursday, July 15 2010
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
The Library of America Outdoes Itself with New Release of a Classic Updike Baseball Essay
News
Wednesday, January 7 2009
Writing too enjoyable an endeavor for John Updike to consider retirement
Stephen King has talked about it. The late Kurt Vonnegut actually did it, for the most part. John Updike has no intention of it. The…
