John updike biography timelines

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    THE JOHN UPDIKE SOCIETY

    BOOKS bygd JOHN UPDIKE, 1958-2023

    The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures: Poems (Harper, 1958)

    The Poorhouse Fair (Knopf, 1959)

    The Same Door: Short Stories (Knopf, 1959)

    Rabbit, Run (Knopf, 1960)

    The Magic Flute (Knopf, 1962)

    Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (Knopf, 1962)

    Telephone Poles and other poems (Knopf, 1962)

    The Centaur (Knopf, 1963)

    The Ring (Knopf, 1964)

    Assorted Prose (Knopf, 1965)

    A Child’s Calendar (Knopf, 1965)

    Of the Farm (Knopf, 1965)

    The Music School: Short Stories (Knopf, 1966)

    Bottom’s Dream (Knopf, 1969)

    Couples (Knopf, 1968)

    Midpoint and Other Poems (Knopf, 1969)

    Bech: A Book (Knopf, 1970)

    Rabbit Redux (Knopf, 1971)

    Seventy Poems (Penguin, 1972)

    Museums and Women and Other Stories (Knopf, 1972)

    Buchanan Dying (Knopf, 1974)

    A Month of Sundays (Knopf, 1975)

    Picked-Up Pieces (Knopf, 1975; assorted prose)

    Marry Me: A Romance (Knopf, 1976)

    Tossi

  • john updike biography timelines

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    UPDIKE TIMELINE

    1932—John Hoyer Updike is born on 18 March in a hospital in West Reading, Pa., the only child of Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, an aspiring writer, and Wesley Russell Updike, a high school mathematics teacher. Because of hard times, they live with Linda’s parents at the house John Hoyer owned at 117 Philadelphia Avenue, in Shillington.

    1936—Updike enters the Shillington public school system.

    1943—Updike enters Shillington High School, where, as a seventh grader and with the publication of “A Handshake with the Congressman,” he contributes the first of some 285 drawings, articles, and light verse to the school newspaper and literary magazine, the Chatterbox.

    1945—Updike’s family moves from the house at 117 Philadelphia Avenue—which was within a short walk of the high school, the after-school hangouts, the playground, and the county poorhouse where children often played—to his mother’s birthplace on a 93-acre farm in nearby Plowvi

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    UPDIKE ON HIS CHILDHOOD

    “The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.”
    (Updike, John. Assorted Prose. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965. 165)

    “One thing is true is that the impressions you get in your first 18 or 20 years are probably the most intense you get. . . .”
    (Updike, John. Conversations with John Updike, ed. James Plath. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1994. 168)

    “In my childhood and youth, radio was everywhere—in the barber shop, at the dentist’s, and on its own little table in the parlor off the living room—a dome-topped brown Philco with an orange dial.”
    (Updike, John. More Matter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. 803)

    “Various artists and writers have influenced me at different times. My first really artistic hero was Walt Disney. I wanted to work for him. Then I sort of fell in love