John Updike: Collected Early Stories

Shillington, Pennsylvania, the birthplace of John Updike, has become through the gift of his fiction the birthright of every American reader, as much a part of our cultural geography as Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, or Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi. Called “Olinger” in many of the stories collected here, it is the quintessential American small town, “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.” Its homely 1940s particulars—the public schools, the luncheonette, the ice-plant fairgrounds, the Lutheran church—provided Updike with his first, authentic taste of life. It yielded a trove of ordinary American experience that, when transmuted into art, proved extraordinary—one of the great treasures of postwar American literature.

“To transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery”—that was Updike’s mission from the start. The familial intimacy and boyhood awakenings evoked in the Olinger stories—“Pigeon Feathers,” “Flight,” “A Sense of Shelter,” “The Happiest I’ve Been”—were but part of that mission. The earliest story here, “Ace in the Hole,” written when Updike was a Harvard senior, tells of a former high school athlete’s uneasy adjustment to the demands of adult life. Others dramatize a young couple’s first brush with adultery, an expatriate family’s complicated feelings for their French bébé-sitter, and the pride of a New England deacon in his seldom-used yet sturdy church building, “this ancient thing” that, despite punishment by the elements and neglect by the community it was built to serve, “will not quite die.” All capture the shared passions, doubts, and longings of Updike’s generation, and, in his famous phrase, “give the mundane its beautiful due.”

Of the 102 stories gathered here, eighty first appeared in The New Yorker. Most were revised by the author for his collections The Same Door (1959), Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Music School (1966), Museums and Women (1972), Problems (1979), and The Early Stories (2003). All were written from 1953 to 1975, when Updike was in his twenties, thirties, and early forties, and are arranged here, for the first time, in the order in which they were completed.

Each is offered in its latest, definitive text, and some incorporate posthumous corrections found in Updike’s personal copies of his books.

Author: John Updike

ISBN:9781598532517