Updike: America's Man of Letters - Softcover

Pritchard, William H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 155849507X ISBN 13: 9781558495074

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005

Synopsis

By the age of twenty-eight, John Updike had already been published in the three major forms―novel, poem, and short story―he would continue to explore with steadily expanding skill and authority. For the next four decades his literary career would realize itself primarily in these three forms, but also in essays, reviews, and memoirs, and in resourceful commentary on his own work―the stuff of many interviews and prefaces. In this book, William H. Pritchard offers not a biography, but an insightful portrait of the writer and his work.

About this title

About the Author:

William H. Pritchard is Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College, where he has taught since 1958. His many books include Shelf Life: Literary Essays and Reviews; Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life; and Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered.

Review:

"William Pritchard has written an intelligent, eloquently argued and highly persuasive study of John Updike's monumental oeuvre. Mr. Pritchard is both sympathetic and critical: his reading of Updike is intimate, knowing, and judicious."―Joyce Carol Oates

"Updike could hardly have had a more able champion. Updike: America's Man of Letters is accessible, balanced, open-minded, free of lit-crit babble and filled with nuanced insight. Drawing on wide learning and extraordinary good sense, Pritchard shows how time and again Updike's critics have simply closed their eyes to the subtleties of the page. . . . His conclusion―that Updike is 'never less than an interesting writer, and at his best a major one'―is not self-evident but hard-earned indeed. John Updike should be grateful for the intelligence and even-handed justice of this assessment. And so should we."―Newsday

"A valuable, quietly passionate work. By examining every genre of Updike's writing―fiction, criticism, memoirs, poetry―comprehensively, keenly, in a style free of academic jargon, Pritchard amply demonstrates Updike's 'fearsome articulateness, at all moments, on all subjects, in all forms'; his extraordinary writerly gift of transforming 'homely' materials (what Updike characterized as 'the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America') 'into radiance'; and his place beside William Dean Howells and Edmund Wilson as a critic 'committed to speaking with conviction, wit, and authority about the intellectual and moral condition of his native land,' who relies on 'nothing more than a cultivated intelligence and assiduous reading.'"―Atlantic Monthly

"If you are serious, you could do a great deal worse than starting off with this extraordinarily nourishing, insightful and readable book by Pritchard―a shining example of commonsense criticism and of the importance of enduringly serious writing."―Baltimore Sun

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 155849507X
• ISBN 13: 9781558495074
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368