{"product_id":"selected-letters-of-john-updike-hardcover","title":"Selected Letters of John Updike - Hardcover","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cp style=\"text-align: right;\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/reportcopyrightinfringement.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eReport copyright infringement\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003cp\u003eby \u003cb\u003eJohn Updike\u003c\/b\u003e (Author), \u003cb\u003eJames Schiff\u003c\/b\u003e (Editor)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe arc of literary giant John Updike's life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors, and lovers--a remarkable outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final days.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAs James Schiff writes in the introduction to this volume, of the writer who would eventually \"express himself in written form as copiously and as elegantly as any American writer\" before him, \"Updike needed to write the way the rest of us need to breathe or eat.\" With his stunning rhetorical gifts--enabling him to thrive in both short fiction and the novel, criticism as well as poetry--Updike was also a consummate letter writer. When barely a teenager, he began submitting poems and cartoons to national magazines and soliciting famous cartoonists, with flattering requests, for a drawing. His letter writing only increased when he left the family farm in Pennsylvania for Harvard, where he composed more than 150 witty, substantive letters to his parents. The summer after he graduated, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e began accepting his work, and his exchanges with editors, publishers, and writers would stretch into a correspondence that, Schiff notes, \"figures not as an adjunct to but rather an integral part of his astonishing literary output.\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe intimacy and lucidity of these letters brings to the fore all manner of subjects and situations, notably the ardent feelings for his first love and wife, Mary, and later the heartbreaking but honestly accounted breakup of their marriage; the uncensored passion for other women, including his Ipswich neighbor, Martha, who became his second wife; the concern for his children's path to adulthood; and the conversations with many literary peers, from Joyce Carol Oates to Philip Roth, as well as his Knopf and \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e editors, critics, translators, and others in the lit business. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eFilled with comic observations, opinions, and personal news, told in the fluid first-person voice of the writer himself, these missives, taken together, create a page-turning \"life in letters\" like no other.\u003ch3\u003eAuthor Biography\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eJOHN UPDIKE is the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009.\u003c\/p\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eNumber of Pages:\u003c\/strong\u003e 912\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eDimensions:\u003c\/strong\u003e 1.8 x 9.3 x 6.2 IN\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePublication Date:\u003c\/strong\u003e October 21, 2025\u003c\/div\u003e\n            ","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51984069591341,"sku":"9780593801543","price":48.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0938\/3185\/6429\/files\/35exC_Ak1L9780593801543.webp?v=1776081737","url":"https:\/\/ishookbooks.com\/products\/selected-letters-of-john-updike-hardcover","provider":"iShook Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}