What’s Up with Updike

Some advice for aspiring writers: if you anticipate your work being purchased en masse one day by the Houghton Library, have a mother who loves you. Or at least a mother like John Updike’s ’54, who compiles and binds your letters to be stored until the end of days.

These letters form part of the Houghton Library’s Oct. 7, 2009 acquisition of the John Updike archive, which comprises approximately 1,500 books and a host of his manuscripts.

Even though the Pulitzer Prize-winning author was president of a semi-secret Sorrento Square organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine, FM still encourages you to take a look at the archive’s more striking pieces.

Included in the collection is a 1961 edition of the famous “Rabbit, Run”, edited for a 1964 reprint, in which the ever-meticulous Updike literally cut and pasted revised paragraphs into the margins and tucked them into the text. The Archive also offers proof that Updike was just another Harvard student, scrawling a less well-known moniker for the greatest English playwright—“Willie the Shake”—onto a copy of “The Tempest” for Professor Henry Levin’s Shakespeare course.

While the majority of the Archive features Updike’s books and manuscripts, some quirkier gems include his Harvard and honorary degrees, his two Pulitzers, his pens and pencils, and the golf cards on which he would jot down ideas.

Leslie A. Morris, the curator of modern books and manuscripts at Houghton Library, says the archive has exciting implication for Updike scholars, as news of two unpublished Updike novels, slated to come out in twenty years, have already been guaranteed to the Library for study. “There will be a lot of surprises, I’m sure,” she says.

Updike’s possessions in the current archive already make up 308 linear feet and will take an estimated two years to sort through. Now that’s a lot of Updike.