From his first collection, The Same Door, released in
1959, to his last, My Father’s Tears, published fifty
years later, John Updike was America’s reigning master of
the short story, “our second Hawthorne,” as Philip Roth
described him. His evocations of small-town Pennsylvania
life, and of his own religious, artistic, and sexual
awakening, transfixed readers of The New Yorker and
of the early collections Pigeon Feathers (1962) and
The Music School (1966). In these and the works that
followed—the formal experiments and wickedly tart tales of
suburban adultery in Museums and Women (1972) and
Problems (1979), the portraits of middle-aged couples
in love and at war with aging parents and rebellious
children in Trust Me (1987) and The Afterlife
(1994), and the fugue-like stories of memory, desire,
travel, and unquenched thirst for life in Licks of
Love (2000) and My Father’s Tears (2009)—Updike
displayed the virtuosic command of character, dialogue, and
sensual description that was his signature.
Here, in two career-spanning volumes, are 186 unforgettable
stories, from “Ace in the Hole” (1953), a sketch of a
Rabbit-like ex-basketball player written when Updike was a
Harvard senior, to “The Full Glass” (2008), the author’s
“toast to the visible world, his own impending disappearance
from it be damned.” Based on new archival research, each
story is presented in its final definitive form and in order
of composition, established here for the first time. This
unprecedented collection of American masterpieces is not
just the publishing event of the season, it is a national
literary treasure.
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