Selected Letters of John Updike

John Updike

ISBN 10: 0593801547 / ISBN 13: 9780593801543

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2025

Selected Letters of John Updike | John Updike | Buch | Einband - fest (Hardcover) | Englisch | 2025 | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group | EAN 9780593801543 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, 36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr[at]libri[dot]de | Anbieter: preigu. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 134150079

Inhaltsangabe:

The 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.

As 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, The New Yorker 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.”

The 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 New Yorker editors, critics, translators, and others in the lit business.

Filled 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.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor: JOHN 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.

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Selected Letters of John Updike
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
Einband: Buch
Zustand: Neu