Life in Letters

Name: Life in Letters - Penguin Random House South Africa
SKU: 9780241707586
Price: 1065.00 ZAR
Availability: InStock

John Updike

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Hardback

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About the book

The arc of literary giant John Updike's life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors, and lovers - a remarkable outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final days

In the words of his contemporary, Philip Roth, John Updike was 'Our time's greatest man of letters - as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short-story writer'.

Over the course of his long and immensely productive career, he also proved himself a brilliant correspondent, his letters filled with comic observations, opinions and personal news, told in his characteristically elegant and exquisitely fluid style.

In this sparkling selection of his letters, edited by James Schiff, we can see...

About the Author

John Updike

John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He is the author of over fifty books, including The Poorhouse Fair; the Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest); Marry Me; The Witches of Eastwick, which was made into a major feature film; Memories of the Ford Administration; Brazil; In the Beauty of the Lilies; Toward the End of Time; Gertrude and Claudius; and Seek My Face. He has written a number of collections of short stories, including The Afterlife and Other Stories and Licks of Love, which includes a final Rabbit story, Rabbit Remembered. His essays and criticism first appeared in publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and are now collected into numerous volumes. Collected Poems 1953-1993 brings together almost all of his verse, and a new edition of his Selected Poems is forthcoming from Hamish Hamilton.

His novels, stories, and non-fiction collections have won have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award and the Howells Medal.

Updike graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of staff at the New Yorker, and he lived in Massachusetts from 1957 until his death in January 2009.