The Early Stories (Paperback) ~ John Updike (Author) Cover Art

The Early Stories (Paperback)

By: John Updike (Author)

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Review

"The America of these early stories may be the mostly untrammeled land we remember; but language in all its fecundity is Updike's native country, and he is its patriot."

"...Updike's stories have an exactitude of psychological registration...that makes for a very much heightened effect; they offer convincing epiphanies done without hyperbole....[T]hese suburbanites and their author have a bracing clarity about themselves, a chilling sense of the real limits of their compassion and their commitments."

"The volume is most useful as a sort of index of Mr. Updike's evolution as a writer...and as a kind of shadow autobiography, tracing the outlines of his life and his ongoing preoccupations....It is the stories memorializing the ordinary mysteries of love and doubt and perseverance that best showcase Mr. Updike's copious gifts as a writer: his keen, journalistic eye for the way people go about their daily lives; his musical ear for the hidden melodies of small-town and suburban life; his instinctive understanding of the contradictory yearnings of the human heart."

"Among the more trenchant reminders here is that early Updike...was very, very good....Another is that Updike stood almost alone among the writers of his time in not thinking that suburban Americans were uninteresting or insipid, and in never mistaking the inhabitants for the surroundings. But the overarching (and somewhat depressing) conclusion is that Updike is one of the few American authors for whom writerly craft remains the essence of fiction....[H]is filigreed sentences remind us what an outright pleasure it is to engage the refined sensibility of a writer who attempts to reflect on things in an interesting way instead of thinking himself interesting because of what he reflects on....[O]ne reads through the plenitude with delight, expectation, and at all times gratitude."

Publisher's note

“He is a religious writer; he is a comic realist; he knows what everything feels like, how everything works. He is putting together a body of work which in substantial intelligent creation will eventually be seen as second to none in our time.”
—William H. Pritchard, The Hudson Review, reviewing Museums and Women (1972)

A harvest and not a winnowing, The Early Stories preserves almost all of the short fiction John Updike published between 1954 and 1975.

The stories are arranged in eight sections, of which the first, “Olinger Stories,” already appeared as a paperback in 1964; in its introduction, Updike described Olinger, Pennsylvania, as “a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid pattern.” These eleven tales, whose heroes age from ten to over thirty but remain at heart Olinger boys, are followed by groupings titled “Out in the World,” “Married Life,” and “Family Life,” tracing a common American trajectory. Family life is disrupted by the advent of “The Two Iseults,” a bifurcation originating in another small town, Tarbox, Massachusetts, where the Puritan heritage co-exists with post-Christian morals. “Tarbox Tales” are followed by “Far Out,” a group of more or less experimental fictions on the edge of domestic space, and “The Single Life,” whose protagonists are unmarried and unmoored.

Of these one hundred three stories, eighty first appeared in The New Yorker, and the other twenty-three in journals from the enduring Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s to the defunct Big Table and Transatlantic Review. All show Mr. Updike’s wit and verbal felicity, his reverence for ordinary life, and his love of the transient world.


From the Hardcover edition.

Annotation

These 103 stories represent almost every one that John Updike wrote during the first half of his literary career--from 1953 to 1975. They are arranged chronologically--not by when they were written, but by the age of his protagonists: awkward adolescents to disaffected middle-aged suburbanites. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.

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