A Life in Letters

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.’