From his first collection, The Same Door, released in 1959, to his last, My Fatherβs Tears, published fifty years later, John Updike was Americaβs reigning master of the short story, βour second Hawthorne,β 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 followedβthe 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 Fatherβs Tears (2009)βUpdike 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 βAce in the Holeβ (1953), a sketch of a Rabbit-like ex-basketball player written when Updike was a Harvard senior, to βThe Full Glassβ (2008), the authorβs βtoast to the visible world, his own impending disappearance from it be damned.β 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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