THE POORHOUSE FAIR was John Updike's first full length
novel, published four years after he graduated from
Harvard. It concerns the events surrounding a fair put on
by members of a poorhouse and is an allegory about charity.
Short and succinct, it speaks to those fears all of us have
of growing not old, but dependent.
"Since the successful poetic novel--for lack of a more
precise term--has long been the most rarefied form of prose
fiction, John Updike, the poet and short story writer, has
done a startling thing in his first novel...by producing,
with almost academic precision, a classic, if not flawless,
example of one." --Whitney Balliett, writing in The New
Yorker
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