To William Maxwell, writer and fiction editor at The New Yorker, who will later serve as Updike’s fiction editor at the magazine.
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Sandy Island, NH
July 30, 1953
Mr. William Maxwell
The New Yorker
25 West 43rd Street
New York, New York
Dear Mr. Maxwell:
Your two letters on the twenty-third were the nicest thing that has happened to me since I began mailing material away five years ago. Thanks a lot for your interest.
I will, of course, try to send you more light verse. The shortages (time, electricity, inspiration) up here may have made me unusually somber, but I am still convinced that the kindest possible way of earning a living is to be a humorist.
Sincerely,
John Updike
with
“Boy Playing Basketball…”
“City Vista”
“The Summer Reader”
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213 Iffley Road, Oxford
October 4, 1954
Dear Mr. Maxwell:
I’m pretty embarrassed. In a rather garrulous letter I wrote Mrs. White this morning, I suggested there would be some noise from me concerning the galley proof of my story. But I’ve just read the proof, and the only improvement I can suggest is that “Friends” be spelled correctly in the title. Otherwise, it read slick as a whistle. I’m sure it isn’t the way I wrote it, quite, but there was no pain at all, so it must be the way I had wanted to write it. I can scarcely wait until it appears.
I’m sure it isn’t the way I wrote it, quite, but there was no pain at all, so it must be the way I had wanted to write it.
The first and last sentences gave me momentary pause. But it is a good idea to establish the time, the so-called “odd hour” right off the bat, and I suppose the kid would be aware of the time even though, as he later points out, he has no wristwatch. And the wine at the end sounds grand—not too grand, I hope, for a liquor store. But I’m sure it isn’t: The New Yorker’s care over details like that is legendary. The fastidious substitution of a “red foil cap” for my cork, or whatever, gave me exquisite pleasure.
As to where it takes place: in Shillington, Pa., a town of some 5,000 pop, 50 miles west of Philly (far enough away, you see, so that it would be worth mentioning that the people were from Philadelphia). The liquor store is situated at the corner of Lancaster Avenue and Sterley Street, and the house is number 17 Spruce Street. A girl I once knew lived there.
Now that we are settled, I am getting quite eager to see the statue of the drowned Shelley. Already I’ve seen some Roman emperors with their faces eaten away. Gave me quite a start. And speaking of garrulity…
Sincerely,
John Updike
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Postcard
Little Violet, Ipswich, MA
March 29, 1957
My address is:
John Updike
R. F. D. Essex Road
Ipswich, Mass.
Looks funny, I know, but I can’t communicate with the mail man very well yet. The area where our mailbox should be is being bulldozed to make a straighter, faster highway. I have the mumps, and this has made moving a little more difficult. The movers haven’t come yet, and my wife says they may not for some time; we’re eating out of ashtrays—that is, Mary is. I can’t chew anything. Elizabeth keeps falling down the steep stairs here. Send the checks. I need the money.
John
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Caldwell Building, Ipswich, MA
September 8, 1960
Dear Bill:
Thanks for your note with its delightful news; of course, I had no hope whatsoever for “The Crow in the Woods,” and consider myself blessed in your taking “Lifeguard.”
It’s of course all right for you to hold it until next summer; I scarcely expected you to run it this summer. I do wish, however, you had squeezed “Pigeon Feathers” in, since there is now a small problem, to wit: you have, counting “A & P,” three summer stories of mine on the bank. Now you have the right to run them whenever you please; but if it is possible, I would appreciate your disposing of them next year, since I plan to have another set of the stories typed up and submitted to Knopf by the end of this year to be published near the end of next (1961). You have, I think, 5 stories of mine that I would hope to include. “The Astronomer” is pretty much anytime, as I remember it; “The Doctor’s Wife” is pretty distinctly January; I see no problem here. As to the other three, I thought I would warn you now, and if Shawn thinks it would not be feasible to space the remaining three stories—two of them quite short—over the four hot months of 1961, it would be helpful to me if I could know ahead of time.
I hope to write one more story, a really good one, to end the book. But needing a story so good rather inhibits writing one; I spent the last two dolorous weeks tapping away at a piece that I am afraid will not do at all. At least I like it so little that I cannot bring myself to type it over and send it down. I had thought of sending the first draft to you and asking if I should plug ahead, but this goes against the way I think writers should behave, and, even when self-confidence and verve drain away, there nevertheless remain certain learned standards of courtesy and responsibility. Who knows, I may send it down yet.
I am balked from beginning a new novel by waiting for the shoe of Rabbit, Run to drop. Furthermore, though I can envisage the texture of the new book, I can’t picture what is happening. Ah, woe. Maybe when the first frost takes its cleansing bite…
You must be kidding about “butt.” It’s really just as crude as “can.” I think the real answer is “tail”—but every time I sit down to go over the proof of “A & P,” I choke up with the silly sacrifice of “can.” Not that it’s much of a sacrifice—but writing is so largely a matter of execution and detail, and with the dropped sentences of Rabbit, Run whispering at me now and then—never mind, I’ll go over it right now, and send it with this letter. [In margin: I have done so—I am delighted at how well the story works with out its last 1/3.]
Mary and I think we will be coming to New York in two or three weeks; when are you leaving the country? My, this is a warm day, for September.
John
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Caldwell Building, Ipswich, MA
February 22, 1961
Dear Bill:
Alfred A. Knopf, from whom some blessings flow, has sent me The Chateau; so that copy of yours that I seem to recall insisting you send me, can be diverted elsewhere; though maybe when you retire to Ipswich you can sign the copy I have.
It’s a wonderful book, a delight, a dream. I am at about page 120. I opened it and, upon finding the lens of the sky set at infinity, fell down down down into a delicious green bower. Everything about it pleases me, from the correctness of all the enclitic marks upward, to the astonishing lambency of the whole. Your fantasies are startling yet most opportune; your French landscape as much there as the handsome red cover itself. I am writing in haste and without the book with me, or I would bore you with some of your happiest passages.
Forgive me now for trespassing on your patience; I keep imagining long conversations in which you solve all my problems.
Most aggravating, the book makes me feel like I am in a room with you and receiving a beautiful sequence of reminiscences and acutenesses and I itch most awfully to join the conversation; to tell you of my adventures at trying to penetrate an alien culture; that curious and comic sensation of everything being difficult, nothing, from the bathroom to the nuance, being in the right place. Your coming to Paris reminds me—what I had thought had sunk totally out of memory—of the week Mary and I once long ago spent there. She was pregnant, it was the Christmas season, and we knew far less French than Harold and Barbara—so little that in a restaurant we can only order omelettes. I remember with almost unbearable affection one scene; Mary, in need of a bathroom, asked, as Radcliffe French 101 had told her to, in a restaurant for the salle de bain. “Salle de bain!? Ut, ut, alors”—all the waitresses, cooks, etc. rushed forward to examine this charming (and by now fiercely blushing) young American lady to discover why, at eleven o’clock in the morning, she needed, in a restaurant, such abrupt ablution. It was, of course, the toilette she needed. Ah, toilette, toilette—and everything came right at last. I remember going into a bookstore and, lost among an alien tongue, picked up one book with an English title and found myself plunged into the most incredibly brutal pornographic tale I have ever seen before or since. The omelettes finally got to me, and lying there in the hotel room, sick to my stomach but not really, looking at that flaking ceiling while some friends of our friends capered around the room chattering with fierce intellectuality, felt myself dying and ascending to a heaven that was just an incredibly sinful flaking ceiling. Beside one of those blandly obscene bidets. Very existential.
I hope, in the book to come, they go to the Louvre. I did like the Louvre. But, aside from its talismanic virtues, it’s a gorgeous novel, and I wanted to tell you so while the fervor moved me. And I loved the little novel you generously put on the back jacket; how wonderful that people changed in the twenties and behaved in a way horrifying to a child. I have never seen the transition so clearly before. The picture of you is great, too, and—one more thing—I love the way of your two parts, one is about seven-eights the length of a book. Like those volumes of Proust: terribly aristocratic. All aquiver with admiration and affection I write this.
Yrs.
John
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La Bastide, Antibes, France [Early January 1963?]
Dear Bill:
This is not so much a submission as a gesture of defeat; but any more messing with it now would just complicate the mess. I think several things went wrong; it was to be the second of five connected short stories and the bind between a novel and short-story threw me. Also, the woman’s point of view proved crippling, though in a few places it seems to ring true. There should be either less or more; my hope was, in undertaking it, to do something with the style equivalent to the glancing way this woman’s mind—at a guess—works. Maybe, in six months, I could pick the live thread out of this and make of it the story it should be. The italicized sections are I think a mistake, created by my fear that I somehow wasn’t getting the essence of it in. Also, of course, I am handicapped by knowing that this couldn’t be printed in the foreseeable future, and by the fact that contemplation of this material has become painful.
Don’t you hate letters like this? I used to get them from my students—the skillful and earnest apology meant to take the place of an honest piece of work. Please don’t read this until you have nothing else to do, and just give me a graceful remark or two to steer by. I do think there is a story in here—at one point I wanted to set it all in the airport—and that some of the dialogue is alive. Forgive me now for trespassing on your patience; I keep imagining long conversations in which you solve all my problems. Put this story in that envelope until I call for it. I suspect that Harry and Sally’s fictional life began and ended with “Warm Wine.”
Muriel Spark is of course a dreamboat, and I shall always treasure that luncheon. My best to Emily, Kate, and Brookie.
John
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From Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff. Copyright © 2025. Available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House Audio from SELECTED LETTERS OF JOHN UPDIKE by John Updike, edited by James Schiff, read by Miranda Updike, Elizabeth Updike Cobblah, Michael Updike, David Updike, Kimberly Farr, Jeff Ebner, Jason Culp and James Schiff. John Updike ℗ 2025 Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.
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To celebrate the publication of Selected Letters of John Updike, join the book’s editor James Schiff for a reception sponsored by The Updike Society at The Salmagundi Club on Tuesday, October 21, at 5:30pm. James will be introduced by Updike’s son, Michael, and discussion will follow. For full details and to RSVP, click here.