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John Updike's mother was a writer and with him being an only child, John had an immense amount of time to read. Like him, his mother was also an only child and grew up in a place called Plowville. She was ambitious to be a writer and was encouraged by her professor at Cornell to continue her writing. She taught Updike a very important lesson about writing, "a writer should know when to quit on a project." This lesson is one that he kept with him throughout the rest of his writing career (Schiff

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Updike is a master in all sorts of genres, ranging from short stories to poetry, and essays to novels. His reputation however, rests mainly on his ability to write and produce exquisite novels. Throughout all his works he seeks to expose the secularism of life in our world because of how disappointed he is in it (Greiner).

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John Updike writes of small town people and he can properly portray them because he grew up as a small town boy. Born on March 18, 1932, in Shillington, PA, Updike lived with his parents and grandparents. They weren't wealthy at all but not so poor that they didn't have a livelihood (Greiner).

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'"My theory about being an American writer, at a time when I was still forming ideas, was that you are American enough just by being you. One of the few things my father said to me, which actually was helpful later in life, he said while he was making a sandwich--he worked in the college cafeteria when he was a young man. I admired how well he buttered the bread. And he said, "Always butter toward the edges--enough gets in the middle anyway." So I thought that I should butter toward the un-American edges; I read a lot of European, Latin American and communist-country fiction in those years of trying to shed new light upon the mystery of what fiction is for and how we can make it fresh"' (Lopate).

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Quote: Critics Are Worth More Than You Think

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Quote: Critics Are Worth More Than You Think

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'"My mother didn't raise me to be a critic. We thought of criticism as a kind of handmaiden to the real arts of poetry and fiction"' (Lopate).

(Updike receives various criticisms about his work, both good and bad)

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"Updike is a master of misdirection, avoidance and deflecting criticism. Sometimes he does it by making a witty, self-deprecating remark he has borrowed from one of his critics. One is not sure just how much irony to read into those jokes. At other times he will answer a question obliquely, but what he is saying turns out to be so interesting and amusing that one feels it would be almost cruel to force him to get back to the subject at hand" (Lopate).

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Updike was a practical man. He wasn't all that creative when it came to writing, and that showed when it came to the heads of the creative writing part of the English department at Harvard. However, Updike was very comical when it came to his un-Harvardian cartoons. He went from the inspiration of Walt Disney to the cartoons found in the New Yorker. He had the ambition to be able to support himself from the work of his pen and imagination (Lopate).

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"'My older son and second child, David, was born in 1957 and attended Harvard, Class of '79, exactly twenty-five years after my class of 1954. He had not shown much literary interest as a child. I rarely caught him reading a book; it was a very different kind of upbringing than I had. Television had come to exist, and television was always there in the house as something you could turn on. Furthermore, he had three siblings, and I had had none. So there was every reason for me to read and for him not to read. He was attracted to a young would-be writer at Harvard, and I think it was partly a courtship maneuver when he himself began to write. I was pretty young when The New Yorker took my first story; I was just out of college and twenty-two. But I think David might have been twenty-one when they took a story of his. It was a beautiful, happy story, like the first story my mother had accepted. Her story was about her grandfather's death and was probably the best thing she ever wrote. David's was about a dog who accompanied him in his boyish rounds around our place in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and at the climax of the story he looks down and sees that the dog's muzzle is gray and realizes that the dog has grown old. It's a wonderful moment, and I'm not sure I'm doing it full justice"' (Schiff).

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"Still, the beginnings of his career as a writer are associated with The New Yorker, for that magazine published his first professional story, "Friends from Philadelphia," on 30 October 1954. Following his return from Oxford in 1955, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, and for the next two years he contributed to the "Talk of the Town" columns. Although he ended his formal ties with the magazine's editorial staff in 1957 and moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, to concentrate on writing, he continued his relationship with the periodical, which has been publishing his poems, stories, essays, and reviews regularly for more than four decades" (Greiner).

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"His memoir "The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood" (Assorted Prose, 1965) captures the centrality of his Shillington years, and he has since implied that the loneliness uncovered by the move to the farm fired his imagination" (Greiner).