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John Updike: Collected Early Stories

102 stories written from 1953 to 1975, including such classics as “The Happiest I’ve Been,” “A&P,” and “The Bulgarian Poetess” More

Edited by Christopher Carduff

“It is in his short stories that we find Updike is most assured . . . and almost without fail they give pleasure, a quality not to be taken lightly.”—The Washington Post

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

News Photos: Debut novelist Kevin Morris gives John Updike his “beautiful due”
March 13, 2017

Interviews Christopher Carduff on the “everyday sublime” of John Updike’s short stories
November 19, 2015

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Shillington, Pennsylvania, the birthplace of John Updike, has become through the gift of his fiction the birthright of every American reader, as much a part of our cultural geography as Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, or Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi. Called “Olinger” in many of the stories collected here, it is the quintessential American small town, “a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid pattern.” Its homely 1940s particulars—the public schools, the luncheonette, the ice-plant fairgrounds, the Lutheran church—provided Updike with his first, authentic taste of life. It yielded a trove of ordinary American experience that, when transmuted into art, proved extraordinary—one of the great treasures of postwar American literature.

“To transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery”—that was Updike’s mission from the start. The familial intimacy and boyhood awakenings evoked in the Olinger stories—“Pigeon Feathers,” “Flight,” “A Sense of Shelter,” “The Happiest I’ve Been”—were but part of that mission. The earliest story here, “Ace in the Hole,” written when Updike was a Harvard senior, tells of a former high school athlete’s uneasy adjustment to the demands of adult life. Others dramatize a young couple’s first brush with adultery, an expatriate family’s complicated feelings for their French bébé-sitter, and the pride of a New England deacon in his seldom-used yet sturdy church building, “this ancient thing” that, despite punishment by the elements and neglect by the community it was built to serve, “will not quite die.” All capture the shared passions, doubts, and longings of Updike’s generation, and, in his famous phrase, “give the mundane its beautiful due.”

Of the 102 stories gathered here, eighty first appeared in The New Yorker. Most were revised by the author for his collections The Same Door (1959), Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Music School (1966), Museums and Women (1972), Problems (1979), and The Early Stories (2003). All were written from 1953 to 1975, when Updike was in his twenties, thirties, and early forties, and are arranged here, for the first time, in the order in which they were completed.

Each is offered in its latest, definitive text, and some incorporate posthumous corrections found in Updike’s personal copies of his books.

Christopher Carduff, editor, is a longtime publishing professional who edited John Updike’s posthumous collections Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism and Always Looking: Essays on Art. He currently serves as the Books Editor of The Wall Street Journal.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

John Updike: Collected Early Stories is kept in print by a gift from Kevin Morris to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

Ace in the Hole
Friends from Philadelphia
A Game of Botticelli
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth
Dentistry and Doubt
The Kid’s Whistling
Toward Evening
Snowing in Greenwich Village
Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?
His Finest Hour
Sunday Teasing
The Lucid Eye in Silver Town
A Trillion Feet of Gas
Incest
A Gift from the City
Intercession
The Alligators
The Happiest I’ve Been
Walter Briggs
The Persistence of Desire
Still Life
Flight
Should Wizard Hit Mommy?
Dear Alexandros
A Sense of Shelter
Wife-wooing
Pigeon Feathers
Home
Archangel
The Sea’s Green Sameness
You’ll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You
The Astronomer
A & P
The Doctor’s Wife
Lifeguard
The Crow in the Woods
The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island
Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car
Unstuck
In Football Season
The Indian
A Madman
My Uncle’s Death
Solitaire
Leaves
The Stare
Museums and Women
Avec la Bébé-sitter
Four Sides of One Story
The Morning
At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie
The Christian Roommates
My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails
Eclipse
Harv Is Plowing Now
The Music School
The Rescue
The Dark
God Speaks
The Bulgarian Poetess
The Family Meadow
Man and Daughter in the Cold
The Hermit
During the Jurassic
The Witnesses
The Pro
The Slump
Under the Microscope
The Corner
The Day of the Dying Rabbit
I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying
Cemeteries
The Deacon
I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me
One of My Generation
The Hillies
The Orphaned Swimming Pool
Plumbing
The Carol Sing
Minutes of the Last Meeting
The Baluchitherium
The Tarbox Police
When Everyone Was Pregnant
The Beloved
The Invention of the Horse Collar
Jesus on Honshu
Commercial
The Gun Shop
Believers
How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time
Nevada
Son
Daughter, Last Glimpses of
Ethiopia
Transaction
Augustine’s Concubine
Killing
The Chaste Planet
A Constellation of Events
The Man Who Loved Extinct Mammals
Problems
Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-251-7 955 pages

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N° 242 Library of America Series

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