Updike
Material type: TextPublication details: New York : Harper Perennial, ©2014Description: xiii, 558p : ill ; 24 cmISBN:- 9780061896453
- 920.9813 23 BEG-U
Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Books | IIITD General Stacks | Autobiography/Biography | 920.9813 BEG-U (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 005532 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
A tour of Berks County -- The Harvard years -- The talk of the town -- Welcome to Tarbox -- The two Iseults -- Couples -- Updike abroad -- Tarbox redux -- Marrying Martha -- Haven Hill -- The lonely fort -- Endpoint.
"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"--
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