Updike, Adam Begley
Updike, Adam Begley
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Updike

Author: Adam Begley

Narrator: Grover Gardner

Unabridged: 20 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/04/2014

Synopsis

A 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 workIn 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 firsthand 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.

About Adam Begley

Adam Begley was the books editor for the New York Observer from 1996 to 2009. He has been a Guggenheim fellow and a fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, and many other publications. He lives in England.

About Grover Gardner

Alexander Adams is a pseudonym for narrator Grover Gardner. His most high-profile book to date is the unabridged novelization of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, recorded in a joint effort by BOT and Random House under the Adams moniker. He lives in Maryland.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jason on April 30, 2014

I thought and dreamt about this book for many years before it existed, or before it was even in the works. I almost never read Updike these days; in my twenties, however, he was second only to Nabokov (another writer I almost never read any more). I didn't just read the Rabbit novels or those old an......more

Goodreads review by Ryan on September 07, 2021

Borges once said of James Joyce that he was less a man of letters than an entire literature. If you want a sentence to sum up John Updike's career - a writer who published over fifty books and twice won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction - you’d struggle to concoct a better one than that. Updike was the......more

Goodreads review by James on July 05, 2014

I've been a fan of John Updike's work for a long time. I read this first biography eager to learn more about where the fiction I admire came from. I was a little surprised to learn that it came from his own life. For the most part he recast his own personal experiences into his writings. From the ea......more

Goodreads review by Ben on January 29, 2015

Let me say upfront: I’m not usually a fan of biographies. They always end badly. Especially in today’s morally unanchored world, the towering ambition of most lives worthy of a biography leaves a path of destruction on the way to temporal success: families destroyed, other careers shortened, lives p......more

Goodreads review by Grady on January 30, 2014

'You have to give it magic' And magic is just the descriptor for this immensely informed and intelligent biography of John Updike by the gifted author Adam Begley. It goes so far beyond where biographies usually tread, giving us insights into a great American author as a man, an original thinker, an......more

Quotes

“A beautifully written, richly detailed, and warmly sympathetic portrait of a great American writer.” Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times bestselling author

“Adam Begley’s Updike is a model of what a literary biography should be: rich with penetrating insights not only about the life but also about the work. It will enthrall longtime Updike fans and help create generations of new ones.” Francine Prose, New York Times bestselling author

“‘You have to give it magic,’ John Updike explained of the stuff on the page; Adam Begley has done him proud, offering up Updike the man and Updike the writer in an exuberant, stunningly choreographed pas de deux.” Stacy Schiff, New York Times bestselling author

“Adam Begley’s brilliant evocation of our own literary giant should be required reading for Americans; Updike illumines a particular era with John Updike’s own ferocity and tenderness.” Jayne Anne Phillips, New York Times bestselling author

“As a biographer, Begley has a great many strengths—concision, eloquence, an eagle eye—and few of the usual shortcomings.” Wall Street Journal

“Fabulous…Updike fans will enjoy Begley’s marvelous biography, which is as much about the man as the writer.” Entertainment Weekly

“A master storyteller comes to affably charming life in Begley’s incisive biography…Begley finds the truest reflection of the man in his work.” Vogue

“A brilliant new biography…Delightfully rich…Highly readable…The joys of Updike are based on discovering the autobiographical content of the tens of thousands of details that populate Updike’s vast fictional universe.” New York Times Book Review

“An exemplary biography, oceanically researched, full of insights…Begley is even-handed in his judgments and is a fine writer himself, his supple and cadenced prose sometimes matching his subject’s.” Sunday Times (London)

“Begley is a perceptive reader, illuminating the different alter egos who populate Updike’s fiction…A generous tribute to an amusing and brilliant man.” Financial Times (London)

Awards

  • BookPage Best Book
  • Amazon Best Book
  • PEN Literary Award
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