John Updike

Marry Me is subtitled “A Romance” because, in the author’s words, “people don’t act like that anymore.” The time is 1962, and the place is a fiefdom of Camelot called Greenwood, Connecticut. Jerry Conant and Sally Mathias are in love and want to get married, though they already are married to others. A diadem of five symmetrical chapters describes the course of their affair as it flickers off and on, and...

A stunning collection of poems that Updike wrote during the last seven years of his life and put together only weeks before he died for this, his final book. The opening sequence, "Endpoint," is made up of a series of connected poems written on the occasions of his recent birthdays and culminates in his confrontation with his final illness ... For Updike, the writing of poetry was always a special joy, and this final collection is an eloquent and...

John Updike's first collection of verse since his Collected Poems 1953-1993 brings together fifty-eight poems, three of them of considerable length. Their four sections take up, in order: America, its cities and airplanes; the poet's life, his childhood, birthdays, and ailments; foreign travel, to Europe and the tropics; and, beginning with the long Song of Myself, daily life, its furniture and consolations. There is little of the light verse with...

A collection of the eloquent, insightful, and beautifully written prose works that Updike was compiling when he died in January 2009, this book opens with a self-portrait of the writer in winter--a Prospero who, though he fears his most dazzling performances are behind him, reveals himself in every sentence to be in deep conversation with the sources of his magic.

A stunning collection of poems that John Updike wrote during the last seven years of his life and put together only weeks before he died for this, his final book.
The opening sequence, “Endpoint,” is made up of a series of connected poems written on the occasions of his recent birthdays and culminates in his confrontation with his final illness. He looks back on the boy that he was, on the family, the small town, the people,...

Updike revisits his three witches of Eastwick, now widows, drawn together with the past still haunting them.