Letters From John Updike

"The stacks at Harvard's Widener Library are, I have come to believe, the best place to hide if you want to spend an afternoon reading uninterrupted but not alone. Widener has that rare charm conferred on a place only once it has been sufficiently drenched in history and filled with books-the most famous of which is certainly Harvard's copy of the Gutenberg Bible, one of 48 still in existence."

"Selected Letters of John Updike, an immense new compendium of the American novelist's personal correspondence spanning nearly seven decades, from the early 1940s to his death, in 2009, underscores the vanishingly short distance between Updike's writing life and his actual life. Not that you need to read his private letters to see that-anyone who read Couples, or followed the very New England scandal it created, will readily understand that Updike wasn't a writer who left any literary fruit unsqueezed."

Harvard's Widener Library houses celebrated rarities and smaller personal artifacts, including an empty bag of Keystone Snacks once kept by John Updike. Updike collected objects and experiences in service of research, and those accumulations surfaced in his novels and characters. Selected Letters spans nearly seven decades of personal correspondence and illuminates the narrow distance between private life and public fiction. The letters present tones that range from winking and earnest to desperate and oversexed, and they aggregate into a portrait in which quotidian detail, scandal, and obsession are integral to creative output.

Read at The Atlantic