Updike

"A brilliant biography. . . . The joys are... discovering the autobiographical content of the... details that populate Updike's vast fictional universe."-Orhan Pamuk, The New York Times Book Review
Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing "middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities."
Updikeexplores the writer's beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer's colleagues, friends, and family, Begley explores how Updike's fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life-including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his first-hand experience of the "adulterous society" he was credited with exposing in the bestselling Couples.
With a sharp critical sensibility, Begley probes Updike's best-loved works-from Pigeon Feathersto The Witches of Eastwickto theRabbittetralogy-and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions. Updikeoffers an admiring yet balanced look at one of American literature's most treasured authors.
"A superb achievement. . . . as rewarding as Updike's best fiction." -Scott Stossel, The Boston Globe
"A monumental treatment of a towering American writer." - The New York Observer
"A highly literate illumination of a supremely literate human being." -Louis Menand, The New Yorker