Updike

Resource Information

The work Updike represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Updike

Statement of responsibility

Adam Begley

Creator

• Begley, Adam

Subject

• BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General
• BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary
• Biographies
• Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography
• Updike, John
• LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General

Genre

• Biography
• Biographies

Language

eng

Summary

"Updike is Adam Begley's masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike--a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed 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."Updike explores the stages of the writer's pilgrim's progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy 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 another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, 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 that lends depth and originality to his analysis, Begley probes Updike's best-loved works--from Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy--and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Updike offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure, a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else's"--

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Biography type

individual biography

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

• 813/.54
• B

Illustrations

• illustrations
• plates

Index

index present

LC call number

PS3571.P4

LC item number

Z556 2014

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography