A Life in Letters

An illuminating collection of letters from one of the literary greats of the 20th century, John UpdikeTwice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for novels about Harry ¿Rabbit¿ Angstrom, John Updike, though very much aware of his gifts and blessings, believed himself to be, like Rabbit, an everyman¿ ¿a relatively fortunate American male¿¿and his life a specimen life, ¿representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world.¿ This belief animated his more than sixty autobiographical books¿fiction, poetry, collections of first-person essays and memoirs¿a body of creative work universal in its literary appeal but intimately based upon, as Updike himself called it, ¿this massive datum that happens to be mine.¿Now, more than a decade after his death, comes a generous volume of letters both personal and professional. We see, at last, Updike in ¿real time,¿ documenting with preternatural facility every stage of his unspooling life, from Pennsylvania farm boy to Harvard sc