Prof.dr.

Rodica Mihaila
Course 1_3
American Literature since 1945
2nd Year American Studies, 3rd Year
Spring Semester 2012

JOHN UPDIKE (1932- 2009)

The Centaurus (1963) has an epigraph from Karl Barth: Heaven is the creation inco
nceivable to man, earth the creation conceivable to him.
He himself is the creatur
e on the boundary between heaven and earth. (Gray 614) Updike once said I feel to
be a person is to be in a situation of tension A truly adjusted person is not a pe
rson at all.
Updike= a literary institution (almost 60 volumes: novels, short stories
, poetry, essays, memoirs, literary and art criticism, journalism)
A master of American style / of post war realism
2 Pulitzer Prizes; many other awards except Nobel
Biography:
-born in Pennsylvania
Harvard
worked for the New Yorker
Born in a small, farming town of Shillington, Pennsylvania reflected in some of
his stories
Family - father: high school mathematic teacher struggled to support a large fam
ily
- mother: ambitious, writer
His first short story at the age of 8.
Honor student in school
Entered Harvard (selected by his mother - wanted him a writer); graduated from
Harvard summa cum laude in 1954
1954 - sold his first short story to the New Yorker
(established his reputation as a writer of short fiction in the 1950
s and 1960s)
1 year on a fellowship studying art in England (whised to be graphic artist)
1955 - job as a staff writer on the New Yorker
regarded as "The Brillant Young Writer" ? poems, sketches, essays, revie
ws
1957 - left the N.Y. moved to Ipswich, Mass. and became an independent writer.
1958 - 1st book: The Carpentiere and the Hen (poems)
1959 - 1st novel: The Poorhouse Fair
1st collection of short stories: The Same Door
became one of the most prolific writers in modern Am. literature (11 novels, art
icles &
reviews, an opera libretto, a play, short storie
s, 4 books of poems)
1963 - The Centaur? National Book Award
more problematic, greater artistic significa
nce
highly symbolic & allusive novel
drew heavily on classical myth
partly an evocation of his father, partly a retelling in modern terms of the myt
h of Chiron, the tutor of Achilles.
the myth of Prometheus & Chiron (a centaur who
was a teacher of
Achilles) - (schoolteacher Caldwell and his so
n)
As Chiron yields his immortality to expiate the mis of Prometheus, so does Caldw
ell accept death as a sacrifice to his artist son.
- various levels mythic

1968 - Couples? won

realistic
allegorical
literal
widespread recognition; a novel of suburban life; commercial

success; adulteries
1978 - The Coup? a dark comedy set in modern Africa. It reports the reminiscenc
es of a
one-time dictator of a newly emerged African nation
Most frequently Updike has set his fiction in small-town America, villages & pro
sperous suburbia - a landscape
The Rabbit Series
Seria Rabbit each book renders the sense of an era.
Rabbit Run (1960)
sexual frankness (brought him to attention)
- the study of a mediocre young man of 26, Harry Angstrom (wife: Janice; son: N
elson) whose former excellence on the basketball court has imprisoned his life &
destroyed his capacity to accept the unglamorous life into which he had drifted
. An aimless, disaffected young husband. A former high school basketball champi
on, Harry wants to discover a fate for himself (spiritual quest
in a was
te land)
-wife: Janice deserts her for Ruth
-son Nelson (3)
Rabbit Redux (1971)
Rabbit is 36. Father in law owner of an automobile sales age
ncy
; caught up in the social turmoil of the 60s; he befriends 2 radicals
(Skitter- black Vietnam vet; Jill) a young man & a woman who is accidentally ki
lled. Updike exposed his old anti-hero to the radicalism and sexual freedom of t
he youth movement of the 1960s. Vietnam war, the black revolution. A small Penns
ylvania town counter culture. Still without a clear purpose.
Rabbit is Rich (1981)- National Book Award & Pulitzer Prize. Rabbit middle-aged,
well-to-do. Inherited the father in law s business
1979 Ten years after Rabbit Redux Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy considerable
prosperity as Chief Sale Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota Agency in B
rewer, Pennsylvania. Member of the local county club. Problems with Nelson. He
feels in good shape until his son Nelson returns from the West.
America of 1979
double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national co
nfidence.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
Angstrom s reconciliation with life and inadvertent death ag
ainst the backdrop of the 1980s. criza si sfirsitul in soc. de tranzitie a anilo
r 80. Neoconservatorism.
Bech books
writers, critics
--Bech: A Book (1970)
--Bech is Back (1982)
--Bech at Bay
A quasi Novel (1998)
The Witches of Eastwick (1984) + The Widows of Eastwick (2008)
Roger's Vision 1986
1986 Poems
Brazil (1994)
In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)
Still Looking: Essays on American Art (2005)
the paperback Three Trips: The Short-Story Writer as Tourist (2005)
Terrorist novel (June 2006)
Characteristics of his art
Novelists of manners:John Cheever (1912-1982), ex.: Falconer (1977) autobiograph
y
Salinger
- suburban settings
- fictional locales on the eastern seacoast.
neorealist fiction

Updike often seen as the most realistic of all the remarkable new noveli
sts who emerged in the generation just after the war
- His remarkable stylistic precision + painterly aesthetic effects
- His realism has the quality he identifies in his writer-hero Henry Bech, a con
cern with a tightness perhaps equivalent to the terribly tight knit of reality.
(Columbia Literary History of the U.S. p. 1138)
-shares the ironic temper & lexical ability of Nabokov & Barth
-sterile in an odd way. Astonishing in imagery
- chooses subtle middle-class characters (of their day) . Updike= the most signi
ficant transcriber or creator rather of middleness in American writing since W.D.H
owells
- a satirist and a celebrator of our social & domestic conditions NORTON
p
. 2173
- novelist of manners
- major themes (in forms of some mythic resonance): love, death, freedom, the bu
rden of redemption in the contemporary novel
- some dread in his work: fear of chaos & waste a sense of one s own emptiness
?
the dread remains locked in the detail.
His America
- a commonplace world of middle-and lower-class materialism
- a land of sterile, empty, trivial lives centered on TV, movies, and fan mags f
or the riff raff
- America's inhabitants are trapped in installment, buying, stomachs are bloated
with franchised food, their minds are dulled by the soaps and by the tablois so
ld at checkout stands
His characters
- often search for spiritual and religious meaning in life
- they discover that in their worlds sentimental love is a trap and a deceit; ha
ppiness is brief; life is as dull as their prepackaged meals.
Critics
- named him the " sweet lonesome singer of Protestant mediocrity
- complains that- he overburdens his prose by straining for elegance
- his work is suffered with nostalgic ("mired in the
realm of childhood")
too often his characters are predictably autobiographical:
-the puzzled young man
-the loyal but not -too-bright girlfrien
d
-the strong, older woman animated by mis
placed
enthusiasm
His strength lies in:
- elegant prose, filled with balanced rhythmic sentences
- his concern with the "business of memory" genetics of families (see interview
)
- his exploration of private feeling
- his writing of clothes, houses, cars, parents & girlfriends
?
a means of portraying an America in all its ugliness
Harry Angstrom depiction of the ebbs & flows of his existence across four decade
s of Am. social & political history (descriere p. 103 outline)
-One of the finest short story writers
- a tender, delicately descriptive style
- a sharp eye for the seemingly insignificant moments in which character
is
revealed and later determined.

See bibliography next page

Bibliography
Rabbit novels
(1960)
(1971)
(1981)
(1990)
(2001)
Bech books
(1970)
(1982)
(1998)
Buchanan books
(1974)
(1992)
Eastwick books
(1984)
(2008)
Other novels
(1959)
(1963)
(1965)
(1968)
(1975)
(1977)
(1978)
(1986)
(1988)
(1994)
(1996)
(1997)
(2000)
(2002)
(2004)
(2006)

Rabbit, Run
Rabbit Redux
Rabbit Is Rich
Rabbit At Rest
Rabbit Remembered (a novella within the collection Licks of Love)
Bech, a Book
Bech Is Back
Bech at Bay
Buchanan Dying (a play)
Memories of the Ford Administration (a novel)
The Witches of Eastwick
The Widows of Eastwick
The Poorhouse Fair
The Centaur
Of the Farm
Couples
A Month of Sundays
Marry Me
The Coup
Roger's Version
S.
Brazil
In the Beauty of the Lilies
Toward the End of Time
Gertrude and Claudius
Seek My Face
Villages
Terrorist

Short Story Collections

(1959) The Same Door
(1961) A & P
(1962) Pigeon Feathers
(1964) Olinger Stories (a selection)
(1966) The Music School
(1972) Museums And Women
(1979) Problems
(1979) Too Far To Go (related short stories about a single family)
(1987) Trust Me
(1994) The Afterlife
(2000) The Best American Short Stories of the Century (editor)
(2001) Licks of Love
(2003) The Early Stories: 1953 1975
(2009) My Father's Tears and Other Stories
Poetry
(1957) Ex-Basketball Player
(1958) The Carpentered Hen
(1963) Telephone Poles
(1969) Midpoint
(1969) Dance of the Solids
(1974) Cunts: Upon Receiving The Swingers Life Club Membership Solication (limit

ed edition)
(1977) Tossing and Turning
(1985) Facing Nature
(1993) Collected Poems 1953 1993
(2001) Americana: and Other Poems
Non-fiction, essays and criticism
(1965) Assorted Prose
(1975) Picked-Up Pieces
(1983) Hugging The Shore
(1989) Self-Consciousness: Memoirs
(1989) Just Looking
(1991) Odd Jobs
(1996) Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf
(1999) More Matter
(2005) Still Looking: Essays on American Art
(2007) Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism