John Updike: A man of contradictions, and a very prolific writer
With the sad passing of John Updike last week, it will still be years before his true impact on the literary world will be realized. But that hasn’t stopped publications like the New York Times from trying to place Mr. Updike in proper perspective, like they did in this article:
Mr. Updike was also America’s last true man of letters, an all-purpose writer and a custodian of literary culture. He wrote more, and in more different genres — stories, novels, poems, essays, reviews, occasional journalism — than anyone since Henry James, and it’s hard to imagine how he can be replaced. Who has the energy, or the eyeballs, for that much reading?
And in the very next paragraph, Mr. Updike is shown as a man who lived outside of the literary culture he dominated so much of:
In many ways, though, Mr. Updike was an unlikely man of letters. He lived a quiet, burgherly life in a seaside Boston suburb and seldom went to literary parties. He dropped by New York now and then to visit museums and see relatives, but he never stayed long. He didn’t teach; he almost never gave blurbs; he belonged to no literary school or faction. His idea of a reward after a morning’s work was not lunch or drinks with other writers but a round of golf with his buddies.
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Anthony, Mar 15, 2010 re: J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, ebooks, and the definition of irony