John Updike's Early Years

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Description

John Updike's Early Years first examines his family, then places him in the context of the Depression and World War II. Relying upon interviews with former classmates, the next chapters examine Updike's early life and leisure activities, his athletic ability, social leadership, intellectual prowess, comical pranks, and his experience with girls.

Two chapters explore Updike's cartooning and drawing, and the last chapter explains how he modeled his characters on his schoolmates. Lists of Updike's works treating Pennsylvania, and a compilation of contributions to his school paper are included, along with profiles of all students, faculty and administrators during his years at Shillington High School.

Review: This book is an enjoyable must for any reader or researcher of Updike's work. Appendix B, Updike's Published Writings Set in Pennsylvania, provides an exhaustive inventory of what readers gather intuitively: Updike's experience and interpretation of his home territory and people from birth through his first years away at Harvard set the patterns of his fictive human interactions and values.

Until the midpoint of his life (with Couples, set in Massachusetts), Updike found in Shillington-Plowville-Reading, Pennsylvania, and environs inspiration for the situations and characters of his creations. Aided by Silcox in Shillington, De Bellis contacted, over the years, many of Updike's friends from childhood and adolescence.

This, combined with his encyclopedic knowledge of Updike, allowed De Bellis to identify scores of fictive actions and characters whose starting points Updike found among his family members, friends, teachers, and acquaintances in small-town Pennsylvania. In the text and the third (of four) appendixes, the author describes Updike's contributions to The Little Shilling and Chatterbox (both school papers) and describes how Updike's mother deliberately guided her son's cultivation of graphic and verbal art, and how Updike himself completed his apprenticeship in basically realist observation and production in these local school publications.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. CHOICE One can hardly imagine a more deeply researched or fascinating account of John Updike's beginnings, and how his experiences were gradually transmogrified into major American fiction. Jack De Bellis has done a splendid job here, and I recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in fiction, especially in the postwar years in America.

It's a splendid achievement. -- Jay Parini, author of The Last Station