Eventually sexual adventure, often rendered with graphic directness, would become a staple of Updike’s fiction, as his mission to record the Protestant ethic met the upheavals of the sexual revolution. This was a conflict he explored in “Couples” (1968), with its ritual spouse swapping, and in the Maples short stories, with their intimate picture of a dissolving first marriage. Some of Updike’s last letters, written when his two sons and two daughters were grown, weigh the painful cost those closest to him paid for his high ambition and remorseless work habits.
But he had chosen his course early and at the end had few regrets. At 75, in a reply to questions sent to him by the novelist Nicholas Delbanco, Updike summed up his journey: “I set out to make a living with my pen, in privacy, in the commercial literary world as it then existed, and am grateful that I managed. It’s been a privilege and a pleasure; and it goes without saying that I’ve been lucky. No impairing disease. No war I was asked to help fight. No stupefying poverty yet no family wealth or business to limit my freedom.”
For all his self-sufficiency, Updike acknowledged, he had received much help, above all from “The New Yorker when it still published many pages of fiction and Alfred A. Knopf Inc. when publishing was still a gambit for sensible gentlemen who trusted their own taste.” These advantages reflected “a world where books were a common currency of an enlightened citizenry,” he wrote. “Who wouldn’t, thus conditioned, want to keep writing forever, and try to make books that deserve to last?”
Read it all.
John Updike’s Archive: A Great Writer at Work
Eventually sexual adventure, often rendered with graphic directness, would become a staple of Updike’s fiction, as his mission to record the Protestant ethic met the upheavals of the sexual revolution. This was a conflict he explored in “Couples” (1968), with its ritual spouse swapping, and in the Maples short stories, with their intimate picture of a dissolving first marriage. Some of Updike’s last letters, written when his two sons and two daughters were grown, weigh the painful cost those closest to him paid for his high ambition and remorseless work habits.
But he had chosen his course early and at the end had few regrets. At 75, in a reply to questions sent to him by the novelist Nicholas Delbanco, Updike summed up his journey: “I set out to make a living with my pen, in privacy, in the commercial literary world as it then existed, and am grateful that I managed. It’s been a privilege and a pleasure; and it goes without saying that I’ve been lucky. No impairing disease. No war I was asked to help fight. No stupefying poverty yet no family wealth or business to limit my freedom.”
For all his self-sufficiency, Updike acknowledged, he had received much help, above all from “The New Yorker when it still published many pages of fiction and Alfred A. Knopf Inc. when publishing was still a gambit for sensible gentlemen who trusted their own taste.” These advantages reflected “a world where books were a common currency of an enlightened citizenry,” he wrote. “Who wouldn’t, thus conditioned, want to keep writing forever, and try to make books that deserve to last?”
Read it all.