Neue Updike-Biographie

Gestern Abend habe ich mein Jugendbuch über eine ganz besondere Bibliothek in New York ausgelesen. Keine Bibliothek im üblichen Sinn, sondern man konnte sich Alltagsgegenstände ausleihen, besondere Kunden konnten auch Dinge aus den Märchen der Gebrüder Grimm ausleihen. "The Grimm Legacy" war ein ganz zauberhaftes Jugendbuch und es hätte noch gute 100 Seiten mehr haben können. Mal sehen, ob ich mir den Nachfolgeband auch bestelle.

 

Heute Abend habe ich dann mit einer Biographie meines absoluten Lieblingsautors begonnen: John Updike! Ich hab' zwar erst  knappe 40 Seiten gelesen, bin aber bereits begeistert. Und es wird auch eine Autobiographie von John Updike erwähnt, die ich mir auf Amazon mal genauer anschauen werde.

 

Mein Neues:

Adam BEGLEY
Updike

Product Description: Updike is Adam Begley’s masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike—a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.

 

In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing “middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities.”

 

Updike explores the stages of the writer’s pilgrim’s progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer’s colleagues, friends, and family, Begley explores how Updike’s fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life—including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his first-hand experience of the “adulterous society” he was credited with exposing in the bestselling Couples.

 

With a sharp critical sensibility that lends depth and originality to his analysis, Begley probes Updike’s best-loved works—from Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy—and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Updike offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure, a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else’s.