Dwight Garner in the New York Times:
Schiff estimates Updike typed some 25,000 letters and postcards over the course of his life. He neglected to keep carbons and used whatever paper was handy. (“I am pleased to see we share a lack of official stationeries,” he wrote to Alice Munro in 2006, reveling in the reverse snobbery.) He didn’t think much of these missives, or so he said. He told his editor at Knopf, Judith Jones, that “my letters are too dull to be dredged up.”
Surely, he knew better. Some 700 of them have been resurfaced by the indefatigable Schiff, who teaches at the University of Cincinnati and is the founding editor of The John Updike Review. Despite Updike’s distance-creating geniality, what an enormous and beneficent bounty these letters are for anyone who cares about this country’s literature during the last half century.
These letters trace Updike’s life (1932-2009) and, because they are so approachable, are not a bad introduction to his work for a young person who has not read him.
More here.
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