An illuminating collection of letters from one of the literary greats of the 20th century John
Updike 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.' 'Nobody has a better understanding of the capriciousness of the
human heart than John Updike' Daily Telegraph 'He was the ideal son of a platonic union
between John Cheever and J.D. Salinger with Nabokov attending the christening as fairy
godfather' James Wood 'John Updike mapped our desires our wishes our wise and unwise dreams
our uncertainties with such elegant precision and for so many years' The Times
