Library of America launches its definitive multi-volume edition of
John Updike's novels with the four early works that signaled the arrival
of one of the most gifted young novelists of the 1960s.
John Updike had already made a name as a contributor of stories and
poems to The New Yorker when, in January 1959, at the age of
twenty-six, he published his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair,
launching one of the most extraordinary literary careers in American
letters. Now, Library of America inaugurates a multi-volume edition of
Updike's novels with this volume gathering his first four novels,
including the landmark Rabbit, Run, chosen in 2010 by TIME Magazine
one of the best 100 novels published in English since 1923. Set in the
near future of 1978, The Poorhouse Fair stages a conflict between John
Hook, a rebellious ninety-four-year-old former schoolteacher now a
resident of a rural poorhouse, and young Mr. Conner, the utilitarian
humanist who runs the facility, as an allegory of resistance in a world
of systems and efficiencies. Updike's legendary rejoinder to Jack
Kerouac's On the Road, Rabbit, Run (1960) introduces us to the
author's most enduring protagonist, Harry Rabbit Angstrom, a onetime
high-school basketball star who, on an impulse, deserts his wife and
son, with tragic consequences. The Centaur, a comic-tragic father-son
novel that mixes memory and myth, won the National Book Award for
Fiction in 1964. The novella Of the Farm (1965) is one of Updike's
loveliest performances, a kind of chamber music for four voices set
during a single memorable weekend.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization
founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by
publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most
significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than
300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in
length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are
printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
