JOHN UPDIKE

Blessings Counted: John Updike

The author on hard work, humor, and who really deserves his Pulitzer Prizes

1. My Mother I grew up watching my mother, a Cornell graduate, clacking away at her Remington typewriter. She sent short stories off to magazines, then got them back in a couple of weeks, so that routine of becoming a writer was familiar to me. I owe my career to her example of trying to make a go of it in this strange trade.

2. Everyday Ethics Those of us who were born during the Great Depression, as I was, were born on the low end of the population demographic. We learned to make much of what we had and to make do. Children got the idea, too, that the good life was to be found in working hard. It’s worth remembering that today.

3. The simple Life I’ve always wanted to honor normal life, full as it is of magic and surprises, in literature. I grew up in a small Pennsylvania town, living with one set of parents and one set of grandparents. One of my first impressions was, “This is life. Life as it is lived by most people is worthy of artistic attention.” I didn’t need to go to war or climb mountains to have something to say.

4. Laugh Lines The nice thing about fiction is it develops our ability to empathize. How easily the mind takes you to the mind of a young girl in 19th-century Russia, for example. But humor is every bit as noble as drama and just as honest. To sit and hold a page and laugh out loud struck me as a remarkable enactment of the immaterial upon the material. The ability to get a reader to laugh doesn’t do any harm, as far as I can tell.

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Read about the man from Reading, Pennsylvania—and how he went from a cartoon-drawing undergraduate to a Pulitzer-winning author—in this biography.

What do a 1970 film and an Eminem song have in common? They owe their titles to Updike’s most popular novel, Rabbit, Run. Find the book about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s complicated adventures here.

Listen to an interview with Updike from 1984 where he talks about his two most famous novels, The Witches of Eastwick and Rabbit Run. Or you can read, watch, or listen to a more recent sit-down with the famous author here.

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