SELECTED LETTERS OF JOHN UPDIKE

Missives from the mountain.

Updike was the great American pastoralist of the 20th century. In scores of stories, novels, essays, and poems, he limned the contours of middle-class suburban calm, literary taste, and the recognition that underneath the glossy surfaces of American success lay the insecurities of ambition and desire. Updike was also a prolific letter writer. He wrote to everyone, from famous writers and politicians to librarians and family members. “I can’t believe that you’re cutting ‘Spider-Man,’” he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe in 1994; after the letter, the Globe reinstated the comic strip. Books are never far from Updike’s purview. A letter to the novelist John Irving from 2000 commends him on his negative review of Tom Wolfe’s novel, A Man in Full: “I don’t like writers who fancy themselves dandies.” Modern readers may find Updike too unapologetically masculine these days. He shared with Irving and Norman Mailer a persona of the American writer as big man on campus: “You’re wise to hold to your mountain.” Of the writer Phyllis McGinley, he wrote in 1958: “She seems to have a firm grip on the minds of thousands of housewives.” In 1960, he wrote to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf that his novels sought “to present an image of an averagely physical young American.” He resisted censorship, feeling that to cave to it would be “to funk my job.” At times, though, he can be dead-on in his judgments: “I feel in general that literary history is too much modelled on biology when it is really more like geology. There is not much evolution; there is a great deal of accidental thrusts and upheavals and whatnot and when it’s all over a map is drawn.” Updike may no longer be the mountain he once was. But his letters draw a map of where we once were.

A sprightly and revealing collection by the writer who captured postwar American life, love, and loss.