Compiled by James Yerkes*
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Last update 8 January 2001
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[Photograph courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf]
1932
John
Hoyer Updike born on March 18 in Reading, PA (model for his fictional Brewer),
son of Linda Grace (Hoyer) Updike and Wesley Russell Updike. Until 13 years
of age lived at 117 Philadelphia Avenue in Shillington, PA. His maternal
grandparents, with whom he lived in the same house during most of his childhood,
together with his parents, were John and Katherine Hoyer. His
paternal grandparents were Virginia and Hartley Updike, and Hartley Updike
was a Presbyterian minister.
1936 Began attending public schools in Shillington, fictionalized as Olinger in his stories and novels. In school there 1936-1950.
1945 Moves on Halloween Day with his parents and grandparents to a farmhouse on an 80-acre farm in the country near Plowville, PA, eleven miles from Shillington. Updike continues in the Shillington public schools, where his father taught junior and senior high school mathematics. The six-room sandstone farmhouse was his mother’s birthplace.
1950 Graduates president and co-valedictorian of the senior class at Shillington High School. During that summer and the two following, he works as a copy boy for the Reading Eagle, writing a few feature stories. In the Fall he entered Harvard University on a tuition scholarship. Begins drawing and writing for the Harvard Lampoon, a humor magazine.
1953 Married Mary E. Pennington, a fine arts major from Radcliffe, on June 26, daughter of Rev. Leslie T. Pennington and Elizabeth Daniels Pennington of Chicago, where her father is minister of the First Unitarian Church in Hyde Park. She is two years older than he. Elected president of the Harvard Lampoon, a campus humor/news magazine. Majors in English Literature. His maternal grandfather, John F. Hoyer, dies in September.
1954 Writes his senior essay on Robert Herrick, the seventeenth-century English poet: "Non-Horatian Elements in Robert Herrick's Imitations and Echoes of Horace." Graduates summa cum laude from Harvard. Sells poem and first short story ("Friends from Philadelphia") to The New Yorker. That summer travels to England on a Knox Fellowship and enrolls in the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford for the 1954-55 academic year. In England he meets E. B. and Katharine White and is offered a staff position at The New Yorker. [Age 8 Photograph by Earl W. Snyder]
1955Daughter
Elizabeth born April 1. That summer in August returns from England, moves
to an apartment at West Eighty-fifth and Riverside Drive in Manhattan,
joins The New Yorker as a staff writer and writes stories
for "The Talk of the Town" sections. High expectations for him by TNY
editor E. B. White. Worked there August 1955 to April 1957.
1957 Son David born January 19. Leaves The New Yorker staff in March to concentrate on his poetry and fiction and moves with his family in April to Ipswich, MA, site of his honeymoon and model for his fictional Tarbox in Couples. Completes a 600-page novel Home on which he had been working for a long period, but decides not to try to publish it. Their Ipswich house named "Little Violet" was on Essex Road, where he begins writing The Poorhouse Fair.
1958 His first book The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (poetry) published by Harper and Brothers, his only trade book not published by Knopf. Rather than change the ending of The Poorhouse Fair as Harper requested, Updike moves to Knopf. In the spring, the family moves into a seventeenth-century clapboard house located at 26 East Street, Ipswich.
1959 Son Michael born in May 14. Publication of The Poorhouse Fair (novel) and The Same Door (short stories). The Carpentered Hen was published in England as Hoping for a Hoopoe. A Guggenheim Fellowship supports work on a longer novel, namely, Rabbit, Run. "A Gift from the City" included in The Best American Short Stories 1959. Reads heavily in Soren Kierkegaard (nineteenth century Danish existentialist philosopher) and Karl Barth (twentieth century Swiss Neo-orthodox theologian).
1960 Daughter Miranda born December 15. Rabbit, Run (novel) published, after a decision to make textual changes by Knopf to avoid possible lawsuits for obscenity. The Poorhouse Fair receives the 1960 Rosenthal Foundation Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and is National Book Award Finalist.
1961 "Wife-Wooing" included in O. Henry Prize Stories 1961. Decides to rent a one-room office above a restaurant in the Caldwell Building on South Main Street in Ipswich. He works there every morning, six days a week.
[Photograph credit: Alfred A. Knopf, in Mr. Knopf's office, 1960, discussing Rabbit, Run]
1962
Pigeon Feathers
(short
stories) and
The Magic Flute
(an adaptation of Mozart’s opera for children) published. "The Doctor’s
Wife" included in O. Henry Prize Stories 1962 and "Pigeon
Feathers" in Best American Short Stories 1962. Publishes
a chapter in Five Boyhoods
(Martin Levin, ed. [Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1962]. This book contains essays by Howard Lindsay,
Harry Golden, Walt Kelly, William K. Zinsser, and John Updike, each representing
from a family and cultural perspective one decade, starting with the1900's
and extending to the 1940's, which was Updike's assignment. On the
cover it is advertised, "An original book by five Americans who came of
age in the twentieth century." Updike's memoir essay, now titled "The Dogwood
Tree: A Boyhood," is reprinted in
Assorted
Prose. That summer he teaches
creative writing at Harvard, the first of two scattered and unsatisfying
stints at college teaching, the next at Boston University in 1974.
Rabbit, Run published in London
by Deutsch after his textual "emandations and restorations" of the original
Knopf edition.
1963Telephone Poles and Other Poems (poetry) and The Centaur (novel) published. Receives National Book Award for Fiction for The Centaur.
1964 Olinger Stories: A Selection (short stories) and The Ring (an adaptation of Wagner’s opera for children) published. Elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. At the invitation of the State Department, visits Russia, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia as part of a U.S.-U.S.S.R. Cultural Exchange Program.
Elected on April 1 to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, at age 32 the youngest person ever elected to its membership. Receives an honorary Litt.D. degree, his first, from Ursinus College in Collegeville, PA, the college where his parents furst met and from which they both received undergraduate degrees.
1965Of the Farm (novel), Assorted Prose(essays and reviews), Verse (a paperback poetry volume containing both The Carpentered Hen and Telephone Poles) and A Child’s Calendar(poetry) published. Receives Le prix du meilleur livre étranger for The Centaur. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Begins depositing his papers in Harvard's Houghton Library.
1966 The Music School (short stories) published. Receives First Prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories competition for the short story, "The Bulgarian Poetess," which is included in this book, and the story is included in O. Henry Prize Stories 1966. This is the only Updike book which has contained a first edition major printing error, a reversed line of English poetry (p. 46). This resulted in three first edition "states" of the book: (1) reversed line, (2) tipped-in page correction, (3) integral leaf.
1967
"Marching through Boston" included
in O. Henry Prize Stories 1967. Signs, along with other writers,
a letter drafted by Robert Penn Warren urging Soviet writers to use the
pen to help restore and defend Jewish cultural institutions.
Receives an Litt.D.honorary degree from Moravian
College, Bethlehem, PA.
1968 Couples (novel) published. Remains on best-sellers lists for a year and its motion picture rights are sold for $360,000. Featured as 26 April TIME magazine cover story, "The Adulterous Society." Moves to London with his family for a year and begins research on Pennsylvania's President James Buchanan. "Your Lover Just Called" included in O. Henry Prize Stories 1968. Writes and performs in Ipswich, MA’s Seventeenth-Century Pageant, Three Texts from Early Ipswich.
1969 Midpoint and Other Poems (poetry) and Bottom’s Dream (an adaptation for children of A Midsummer Night’s Dream) published. Returns with his family from London.
1970Beck: A Book (a story cycle) published. "Bech Takes Potluck" included in O. Henry Prize Stories 1970. Rabbit, Run is made into a movie, starring James Caan, Anjanette Comer, Jack Alberston, and directed by Jack Smight. He travels to Japan and Korea with his daughter Elizabeth and the family moves to a house at 50 Labor-in-Vain Road, Ipswich. In May writes the libretto for The Fisherman's Wife, with music by Gunther Schuller.
[Photograph by Michael Chikiris]
1971Rabbit
Redux
(novel) published. Receives
Signet Society Medal for Achievement in the Arts and is a National
Book Award Finalist.
1972 Museums and Women and Other Stories (short stories) published. Updike’s father dies April 16 in Plowville, PA. Appointed Honorary Consultant in American Letters to the Library of Congress for a three-year term. Lectures in Venezuela March 8-14 as the guest of the Centro Venezolano Americano.
1973 Travels and lectures for three weeks as a Fulbright Lincoln Lecturer in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia, accompanied by his wife, Mary.
1974 Buchanan Dying (closet drama with extensive Afterword) published. "Son" included in Best American Short Stories 1974. Separates from his wife Mary and moves to an apartment at 151 Beacon Street in Boston, and teaches at Boston University in the Fall--the second unsatisfying stint in the classroom. With John Cheever, Arthur Miller, and Richard Wilbur, he composes an open letter to USSR Ambassador Anatoly Dobrinin to cease the official harassment of Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Is awarded an honorary Litt.D. degree from Lafayette College in Easton, PA.
1975 A Month of Sundays (novel), the first in his "Scarlet Letter" trilogy, and Picked-Up Pieces (essays and criticism) published. "Nakedness" included O. Henry Prize Stories 1975. Receives the Lotus Club Award of Merit.
1976 Marry Me: A Romance (novel ) published. Special Award for Continuing Achievement in O. Henry Prize Stories 1976, which includes "Separating." "The Man Who Loved Extinct Mammals" included in Best American Short Stories 1976. Elected to the fifty-member Academy of Arts and Letters within the larger National Institute of Arts and Letters. On April 29 a shortened version of Buchanan Dying premieres at the Green Room Theater at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.
The Updikes file for divorce and in March are granted a Massachusetts no-fault divorce.
[Photograph by Peter Simon]
1977 Tossing and Turning (poetry) and a new edition of The Poorhouse Fair with his own introduction published. Marries Martha Ruggles Bernhard on September 30 and lives with her and her three sons at 58 West Main Street in Georgetown, MA. She is five years younger than he.
1978 The Coup (novel) is published. Invited to testify in Boston before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, where he speaks against government support for the arts.
1979Too Far To Go: The Maples Stories (collection of the Maples couple short stories) and Problems and Other Stories (short stories) published. NBC two-hour television production of Too Far to Go, directed by Fiedlder Cook, with Blythe Danner, Kathryn Walker and Michael Moriarty.
1980 "Gesturing" included in Best American Short Stories 1980. "The Music School" is produced for PBS and broadcast the week of April 28 as part of "The American Short Story" series.
1981 Rabbit Is Rich (novel) is published. He is awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal for literature. "Still of Some Use" included in Best American Short Stories 1981. As the subject of a BBC documentary, "What Makes Rabbit Run?", he embarks on a nostalgic October journey to Ipswich and Berks County, PA, with a British film crew. In July attends the University of Rhode Island Summer Writers Conference. Steps down as Chair of the Liteary Awards Committee of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
1982
Bech Is Back
(a story
cycle) published. For the second time featured as TIME magazine
cover story, "Going Great at 50," October 18 issue. Moves in May
to Beverly Farms, MA. In honor of his fiftieth birthday, Knopf reissues
in a new edition Updike’s first book, The Carpentered Hen.
He is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the American National
Book Award , and The National Book Critics Circle Award for
Rabbit Is Rich.
Moves in May to Beverly Farms, MA, and joins St. John's Episcopal Church. Albright College in Reading, PA, awards him an honorary Litt.D. degree.
1983 Hugging the Shore (essays and criticism) published. "Deaths of Distant Friends" included in The Best American Short Stories 1983 and "The City" included in O. Henry Prize Stories 1983. Receives the Distinguished Pennsylvania Artist Award and the Lincoln Library Award, the latter bestowed by he Union League Club. In May travels to Harrisburg, PA, to receive the fourth Distinguished Pennsylvania Artist Award from Governor Richard Thornburgh.
1984 The Witches of Eastwick(novel) is published. Edits and writes the Introduction for The Best American Short Stories 1984. PBS film version of "The Christian Roommates" (titled "The Roommate") aired January 27. Awarded the National Arts Club Medal of Honor and Hugging the Shore receives his second National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
1985Facing Nature (poetry) published. "The Other" included in O. Henry Prize Stories 1985. Receives the Kutztown University Foundation Director's Award "in recognition of leadership, dedication and service to others in the community, especially in the area of education." At the same ceremony his mother receives the university's Distinguished Alumni Service plaque.
1986Roger’s Version (novel) published, the second in the "Scarlet Letter" trilogy. Attends the "Vienna Show" in Paris, featuring paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Adolph Hitler.
[Photograph by Geroge Disario]
1987Trust
Me (short stories) published and receives
the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Fiction. "The Afterlife" included
in The Best American Short Stories 1987. Hollywood
film adaptation of The Witches of Eastwick, directed by George
Miller and starring Jack Nicholson, Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan
Sarandon.
1988 S.(novel) published, the final book in his "Scarlet Letter Trilogy." "Leaf Season" included in O. Henry Prize Stories 1988. PBS on February 17 airs a film adaptation of "Pigeon Feathers" for American Playhouse, directed by Sharon Miller. Receives the Bobst Award for Fiction. In October, gives the first Annual PEN/Malamud Memorial Reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Receives the Life Achievement Award from Brandeis University.
1989 Just Looking: Essays on Art (art criticism) and Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (autobiography) published. Updike’s mother dies at the farm in Plowville, PA. For a fictionalized account of his return to the house after her death, see "A Sandstone Farmhouse" in The Afterlife and Other Stories (1994). Receives the National Medal of Arts from President Bush in a November 17 ceremony at the White House.
1990 Rabbit at Rest (novel) published, the fourth and final volume in the Rabbit (Harry) Angstrom saga. Returns to PA to talk about his childhood and "Rabbit" books with a film crew from the South Bank Show, London Weekend Television. [Photograph by Hana Hemplova]
1991
Odd Jobs(essays
and criticism) published. Receives a second Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit
at Rest, only the third American to be honored with this prize
on two occasions, and also his third
National Book Critics Circle Award.
"A Sandstone Farmhouse" is awarded the First Prize in the O. Henry Prize
Stories competition—his second. Receives First Prize in Prize Stories
1991 and is included in The Best American Short Stories 1991.
Receives Italy’s
Premio Scanno Prize for Trust Me.
1992 Memories of the Ford Administration (novel) published. Early in the year Updike travels to Brazil. Receives a Doctor of Letters honorary degree from his alma mater Harvard University at it June 341st Commencement.
1993 Collected Poems 1953-1993published, his fortieth book with Knopf. Travels to Key West, FL, in July to accept the second Conch Republic Prize for Literature. Receives the Common Wealth Award.
1994 Brazil (novel) and The Afterlife and Other Short Stories published. "The Sandstone Farmhouse" receives First Prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Updike's second such prize.
1995 Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy published (Everyman’s Library Edition #214). A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects, a book of children’s poems is also published. Photographs by David Updike, his son. Awarded the Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Rabbit at Rest. The Howell's Medal is given every five years to the finest work of fiction in the preceding five years. Receives the French honorary rank of Commandeur de l'ordre des arts et des lettres.
1996 In the Beauty of the Lilies (novel) and Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf(articles and short essays) published. Receives the Ambassador Book Award for In the Beauty of the Lilies. The Ambassador Book Awards are presented annually in four categories to books which have made an exceptional contribution to the interpretation of life & culture in the US. [Photograph by Francine Fleisher]
1997Toward
the End of Time published in September
(novel). Received the Campion Award September 11 from the
Jesuit magazine America as a "distinguished Christian person
of letters," an award named for St. Edmund Campion who was hanged, drawn,
and qaurtered for his Catholic faith at the age of forty-one, in London
1581.
1998 Receives the Harvard Arts First Medal. The medal was presented to Updike on May 2 during Arts First, the sixth annual celebration of the arts at Harvard. He is the fourth recipient of the award. Previous honorees were Jack Lemmon ’47, Pete Seeger ’40 and Bonnie Raitt, a member of the class of 1972.
During late September and early October he travels with his wife Martha to mainland China.
Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel is published by Knopf on September 30th.
Updike receives the 1998 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in New York City on November 18.
Edits A Century of Arts & Letters: The History of the National Institute of Arts & Letters as Told, Decade by Decade, by Eleven Members, published by Columbia University Press. He has been a member of the Academy since 1 April 1964, when at age 32 he became the youngest person ever elected to its membership.
1999 Edits and writes the Introduction for The Best American Short Stories of the Century, published by Houghton Mifflin. Co-edited by Katrina Kenison. His own story, "Gesturing," is included as the 1980 entry.
A Child' Calendar (poems, 1965) reprinted by Holiday House (New York) in July, with the earlier poems slightly edited and with illustrations by Trina Scharet Hyman. More Matter: Essays and Criticism is published in September by Knopf with 900 pages of material, mostly items gathered over the last eight years from his published essays, reviews, and editorial introductions. In November travels with his wife Martha to China for two weeks with a Smithsonian Institution tour.
2000 Gertrude and Claudius published mid-February 2000, ostensibly to correspond to Valentine's Day, though copies were circulating earlier. His A Child' Calendar, republished with Trina Scharet Hyman in 1999, receives one of the four Caldecott silver "Honor" awards. On Literary Biography distributed in late March 2000, but the University of South Carolina Press publication date in the book is 1999. This small special edition of 500 numbered copies is the text of a lecture presented at the University of South Carolina on 13 November 1998. In August publishes a new edition of Buchanan Dying (Knopf 1974) with Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, PA, and includes a new Foreword. Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, "Rabbit Remembered" published on November 7. A second edition of Just Looking: Essays on Art was released by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts December 15.
Received the fourth annual Enoch Pratt Society Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement on November 16 at the Central Library in Mount Vernon, MD.
*CREDITS
This biographical and literary chronology was compiled from many sources, Updike’s own writings and those of others. Recently (December 1996) he was kind enough to review this chronology himself and several corrections were made with his assistance. Seven other sources were especially helpful to me in this process: Jack De Bellis, The John Updike Encyclopedia (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2000), pp. xxv-xxxiii; Robert Detweiler, John Updike (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984), pp. vi-vii; Judie Newman, John Updike (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 159-160; Robert M. Luscher, John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), pp. 219-234; and Conversations with John Updike, edited by James Plath (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1994), pp. xxi-xxvi; and James A. Schiff, John Updike Revisited (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), pp. 215-219; David Thorburn and Howard Eiland, eds., John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), pp. 212-214.
For the most extensive bibliographical resource currently available see the splendid work of Jack De Bellis, John Updike: A Bibliography, 1967-1993 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. ix-335. De Bellis includes not only all works by Updike (including drawings, letters and a catalogue of translations into other languages), but also all works about Updike (including dissertations and theses). For the bibliography of Updike's works from 1947-1967, on which De Bellis builds, see John Updike: A Bibliography by C. Clarke Taylor (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1968). See also Michael A. Olivas, An Annotated Bibliography of John Updike 1967-1973 (New York: Garland, 1975) and B. A. Sokoloff and David E. Arnason, John Updike: A Comprehensive Bibliography (Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Press, 1971). For a more recent bibliographical resource of Updike criticism see James Yerkes (Ed.), John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), pp. 269-278)
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