Updike

Author: Adam Begley

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $24.99 AUD
  • : 9780061896460
  • : HarperCollins Publishers Inc
  • : HarperCollins
  • :
  • : 0.504
  • : March 2015
  • : 203mm X 135mm X 24mm
  • : United States
  • : April 2015
  • :
  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

  • :
  • :
  • : Adam Begley
  • : Paperback / softback
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • : 813.54
  • :
  • :
  • : 592
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
Barcode 9780061896460
9780061896460

Description

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.

Reviews

"A sympathetic and thorough biography. . . . The more I read "about" Updike, the more I wanted to go back and "read" Updike.--"USA Today"