From his first collection, The Same Door, released in 1959, to his
last, My Father's Tears, published fifty years later, John Updike was
America's reigning master of the short story, "our second Hawthorne," as
Philip Roth described him. His evocations of small-town Pennsylvania
life, and of his own religious, artistic, and sexual awakening,
transfixed readers of The New Yorker and of the early collections
Pigeon Feathers (1962) and The Music School (1966). In these and the
works that followed--the formal experiments and wickedly tart tales of
suburban adultery in Museums and Women (1972) and Problems (1979),
the portraits of middle-aged couples in love and at war with aging
parents and rebellious children in Trust Me (1987) and The Afterlife
(1994), and the fugue-like stories of memory, desire, travel, and
unquenched thirst for life in Licks of Love (2000) and My Father's
Tears (2009)--Updike displayed the virtuosic command of character,
dialogue, and sensual description that was his signature.
Here, in two career-spanning volumes, are 186 unforgettable stories,
from "Ace in the Hole" (1953), a sketch of a Rabbit-like ex-basketball
player written when Updike was a Harvard senior, to "The Full Glass"
(2008), the author's "toast to the visible world, his own impending
disappearance from it be damned." Based on new archival research, each
story is presented in its final definitive form and in order of
composition, established here for the first time. This unprecedented
collection of American masterpieces is not just the publishing event of
the season, it is a national literary treasure.
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.
