A Life in Letters

John Updike

11/2025 · Random House

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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.’

Acerca do autor

John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He is the author of over fifty books, including The Poorhouse Fair; the Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest); Marry Me; The Witches of Eastwick, which was made into a major feature film; Memories of the Ford Administration; Brazil; In the Beauty of the Lilies; Toward the End of Time; Gertrude and Claudius; and Seek My Face. He has written a number of collections of short stories, including The Afterlife and Other Stories and Licks of Love, which includes a final Rabbit story, Rabbit Remembered. His essays and criticism first appeared in publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and are now collected into numerous volumes. Collected Poems 1953-1993 brings together almost all of his verse, and a new edition of his Selected Poems is forthcoming from Hamish Hamilton.

His novels, stories, and non-fiction collections have won have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award and the Howells Medal.

Updike graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year at Oxford's Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of staff at the New Yorker, and he lived in Massachusetts from 1957 until his death in January 2009.

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