Author Updike Passes Away at 76

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John H. Updike ’54, who showed early signs of his writing prowess while walking the halls of Harvard’s English department, died yesterday of lung cancer at the age of 76.

Updike is known for authoring more than 50 books over the course of his decades-long career, winning two Pulitzers for his works “Rabbit is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest.” He spent more than two decades at The New Yorker and was also noted for his poetry and short stories.

“One of the things that is inspiring to writers is that he just never stopped writing,” said English Professor Louis Menand, an expert on American literature penned during the Cold War. “He wrote a book every year.”

Updike served an eventful term as President of The Harvard Lampoon in 1953—kidnapping the president of The Harvard Crimson and orchestrating a close save of The Lampoon’s famed ibis statue. A noted perfectionist, he graduated summa cum laude the following year with a degree in English, before going on to a fellowship at Oxford and a job at The New Yorker.

AN ‘UNTROUBLED’ WRITER

Although Updike first arrived at Harvard hoping to become a cartoonist, he showed early promise as a writer.

Lewis L. B. Gifford ’51, who worked with Updike on The Lampoon, said that Updike once showed him a bound volume of his early writings in his Hollis dorm room. The work had been typed by Updike’s mother, herself an aspiring writer who worked in a department store.

“It was like a premonition that he wasn’t fooling around: nor was his mother,” Gifford said.

Michael J. Arlen ’52 met Updike when he arrived at The Lampoon as a freshman with stack of clippings from his high school newspaper tucked under his arm.

“He was one of those untroubled writers,” Arlen said of his younger colleague. Books, he recalled, came to Updike as effortlessly as dreams.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Many of Updike’s friends on The Lampoon came from wealthier backgrounds, but that did not stop the young writer—who grew up in Reading, Pa. and attended a small-town public school—from rising to the helm of the nationally-known humor magazine in 1953.

The writer’s humble background became a factor later, when the Signet Society—Harvard’s social club of arts and letters—almost did not accept Updike into their cloistered circle. Then-Crimson President Michael Maccoby ’54 nominated Updike for inclusion in the Signet, but Updike was not able to pay the membership fee.

“I said to them, ‘Let me just tell you something: if you don’t let John Updike into the Signet Society, you’re going to regret it for the rest of your lives,’” Maccoby said yesterday.

According to Maccoby, the Signet Society then waived all of Updike’s fees.

CAMPUS PRANK

Updike’s playful side will forever be memorialized in one 1953 incident that pit The Crimson and The Lampoon against one another.

As Maccoby was walking back to Lowell House for lunch, Updike and three co-conspirators from The Lampoon burst out of a nearby building, grabbed him, and pushed him into a car, according to Maccoby.

“I assume he orchestrated the whole thing,” Maccoby said of Updike, who was leading The Lampoon at the time. “He took credit for it.”

The kidnapping was an act of retaliation against The Crimson’s earlier theft of the iconic golden ibis figure from atop The Lampoon’s castle-like headquarters. But The Crimson maintained the upper hand.

Having escaped his captors, Maccoby and then-Managing Editor George S. Abrams ’54 went to the Russian Embassy in New York City to present the ibis as a sign of goodwill on behalf of American students.

According to Maccoby, the Russians accepted the gift. It was crated up on the harbor—ready to be placed on a ship— when one of Updike’s minions from The Lampoon arrived to take it back to Mt. Auburn Street.

Media coverage of the spectacle reached all the way to The New York Times under the headline, “Harvard Crimson’s Gift to Reds Ends Up as Campus Prank.”

‘THE WAY THINGS REALLY ARE’

Despite the kidnapping incident, Updike and Maccoby felt “mutual respect” for each other, according to Maccoby.

“I said that this whole Lampoon was worthless except for one person, and that was John Updike,” he said, recalling a review of the humor magazine that he penned in 1952.

Rather than relish the praise, according to Maccoby, Updike walked to The Crimson to tell Maccoby that he had caused a “big problem” with Updike’s colleagues on The Lampoon, who were suspicious of what they thought was becoming “a special relationship” between the two eventual leaders.

Hijinks aside, Updike, who was producing much of The Lampoon’s content while maintaining an exemplary academic record—he was one of only eight in his class to be inducted to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior—was not at leisure to have a highly active social life.

“John certainly wasn’t a recluse,” said former Lampoon writer Eric B. Wentworth ’54, “but he wasn’t a highly gregarious guy.” He didn’t have time to devote to politics or parties, according to Wentworth, who lived in Lowell House with Updike.

Updike remained a busy man until his death, In a profile of Updike for his graduating class’s 50th reunion, The Crimson reported that as of 2004, the author tried to write three pages daily. Updike managed to publish “The Widows of Eastwick” in 2008.

While Updike excelled in a number of different genres, Menand said that he especially admired Updike’s short stories, which he said he would place at the level of Hemingway’s and James Joyce’s.

“The story’s like a mousetrap,” he said. “You leave the cheese, and suddenly: Boom! Something happens.”

“Joyce called it an epiphany: this moment in a short story where you suddenly see the story in a different way—the way things really are,” Menand added.

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Chelsea L. Shover can be reached at clshover@fas.harvard.edu.