Happy birthday to American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, & literary critic #JohnUpdike, born on this day (3/18) in 1932. (He passed away in 2009.)

He is one of only four writers to win the #PulitzerPrize for #Fiction more than once (“Rabbit Is Rich” 1981 & “Rabbit at Rest” 1990).

Todos nós fomos criados para desejar coisas e talvez o mundo não seja suficientemente grande para tantos desejos. Eu não sei. Eu não sei nada.”

Recordando John Updike, nascido #nestedia 18 de março de 1932. Encontra os seus livros na Biblioteca Municipal de Coimbra.

#aniversários #JohnUpdike

"I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head."

✒ American novelist, poet, short-story writer, #art critic, and literary critic #JohnUpdike was #BOTD 18 March 1932. #Literature #Poetry #Writing

PERFECTION WASTED
by #JohnUpdike

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market-
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched

"Perhaps women are biologically conditioned to accept flowers, even from total strangers on the street" #greatwriting from #JohnUpdike as narrator's wife smiles "Grazie" to a flirtatious Italian stranger. #writingcommunity #writing #booksky #books #writerslife.

Author of the Year: 2009

The most significant author who died in 2009.

John Updike (1932-2009)

#Booksky #Authoroftheyear #Johnupdike #rabbitrun #Americannovelists

"İnsanları bellekte sevmek kolaydır; zor olan, onları karşınızdayken sevmektir."
#JohnUpdike

Amerika'lı yazar, şair, sanat ve edebiyat eleştirmeninin aramızdan ayrılışının 16. yılında saygıyla..

John Updike (1932-2009), American novelist

Died #otd John Updike (1932-2009), American novelist, 17 years ago today #JohnUpdike life story...

Literarischer #27Januar

„Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.”

#JohnUpdike #RabbitRedux Tod 2009

"I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head."

✒️ American novelist, poet, short-story writer, #art critic, and literary critic #JohnUpdike passed away #OTD 27 January 2009. #Literature #Poetry

As the year wraps up: 9 of 102 books read (one more than last year), book 10 to commence! Auditory support kept me on track.❤️ Buying no books? Failed gloriously. Not sad.🥲 📚💙 #BookSky #ReadingAllTheBooksOnMyBookshelf #CryingInADHD #RabbitRun #JohnUpdike #EncyclopediaofFaeries #EmilyWilde

John Updike’s best books – Ranked! Following the publication of the novelist’s letters, we count down the best of his books, from the dark magic of The Witches of Eastwick to the misadventures of Rabbit Angstrom

#booksky #reading #books #johnupdike

"Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life."-John Updike

#favoriteseason #patternsinnature #nature #ecology #visualhaiku #environment #contemplative #urbanphotography #zenmoment #pnw #rain #urban #storm #johnupdike

Love the film Witches of Eastwick so I've just read the book by John Updike. The film adaptation is quite far removed. Now reading the sequel The Widows of Eastwick. Imagine #Cher #SusanSarandon & #MichellePfieffer reprising their roles. The gays would go into meltdown #witchesofeastwick #johnupdike

John Updike: A Life in Letters review – the man incapable of writing a bad sentence Friends, enemies and lovers animate more than 60 years of the author’s remarkable correspondence

📖 #JohnUpdike: A Life in Letters #Book #Review – the man incapable of writing a bad sentence

Friends, enemies and lovers animate more than 60 years of the author’s remarkable correspondence

#Literature #Writing

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n...

Richard Smith: “Psoriasis is my health” To most doctors psoriasis is a disease to be fought, contained, and even cured, but is this far too narrow a view? John Updike, one of the greatest writers in English of the past century, had psoriasis for almost all his life, and he writes in _Self-Consciousness_ : “Psoriasis is my health. Its suppression constitutes a poisoning of the system, of my personal ecology,” and “psoriasis is normal, and its suppression abnormal.” How can doctors who study disease and a patient who sees deep inside himself have such different views? The patient comes first, and so it is the doctors who must learn. It would be too simple to say that Updike liked his psoriasis. He spent his life battling it and trying to conceal his scales. He felt himself to be a “monster” and it stopped him learning to swim until he was at Harvard, when it was humiliating not to be able to swim. He felt too that it was a “self-generated scandal.” But psoriasis kept him out of the army, for which he was grateful, even though he recognised that it “would handicap no killing skills.” Updike developed psoriasis aged 6 in 1938, and his doctor—who himself had psoriasis and regretted that it stopped him being a surgeon—prescribed Siroil, which smelt and was useless. Updike then discovered the power of the sun, and for much of the rest of his life sought out the sun to clear his scales, even travelling to the Caribbean when it was winter in the United States. “My condition,” writes Updike, “forged a hidden link with things elemental—with the seasons, with the sun . . . ” In the 1970s Updike was living in New England, close to the Ipswich beach that “cured” him in the summer, and so was one of the first to benefit from PUVA (psoralen plus ultraviolet A), which was developed at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Eventually, however, he suffered from photoxicity, which “feels like sunburn of the muscles” and which caused him to walk “like a Japanese woman.” So he was switched to methotrexate, which meant he couldn’t drink alcohol. Updike believes, however, that his psoriasis was the making of him. He observes that Italians call it _morbus fortiorum_ —“the disease of the stronger”—and writes: _Whenever in my life I have shown some courage and originality it has been because of my skin. Because of my skin, I counted myself out of any of those jobs—salesman, teacher, financier, movie star—that demanded being presentable. What did that leave? Becoming a craftsman of some sort, closeted and unseen—perhaps a cartoonist or a writer, a worker in ink who can hide himself and send out a surrogate presence, a signature that multiplies even while it conceals._ _Why did I marry so young? Because, having once found a comely female who forgave me my skin, I dared not risk losing her and trying to find another.__Why did I have children so young? Because I wanted to surround myself with people who did not have psoriasis. Why, in 1957, did I leave New York and my nice employment there? Because my skin was bad in the urban shadows, and nothing, not even screwing a sunlamp bulb into the bathroom socket above my bathroom mirror, helped. Why did I move, with all my family, all the way to Ipswich, Massachusetts? Because this ancient Puritan town happened to have one of the great beaches of the North East, in whose dunes I could, like a sin-soaked anchorite of old repairing to the desert, bake and cure myself._ Psoriasis “made him into a prolific, adaptable, ruthless enough writer.” It was the source of his creativity. “What was my creativity, my relentless need to produce but a parody of my skin’s embarrassing overproduction?” His thick skin allowed him to shrug off rejections. And “having so long carried a secret behind my clothes, I had no trouble with the duplicity that generates plots.” The dualism between his skin and himself appeared to him “the very engine of the human.” Perhaps it’s too much to expect doctors treating patients with psoriasis to carry all these thoughts in their heads, but the great doctors are the ones who can begin to understand exactly how patients feel about their disease and adapt their management and conversation accordingly. This applies not only to psoriasis but to all conditions, especially perhaps mental health problems. Very few patients have Updike’s power to analyse and describe how they feel about their diseases, but that’s why it’s so important for doctors to read accounts like Updike’s. Anatole Broyard is another who has written deeply about his illness, proposing that “To get to my body, my doctor has to get to my character. He has to go through my soul.” Writing his memoirs entitled _Self-Consciousness_ , which were published in 1989, Updike imagined how he would become “too ill for all these demanding and perilous palliatives,” and how “the psoriasis like a fire smouldering in damp peat will break out and spread triumphantly; in my dying I will become hideous, I will become what I am.” _**Richard Smith** was the editor of The BMJ until 2004. He is now chair of the board of trustees of icddr,b [formerly International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh], and chair of the board of Patients Know Best. He is also a trustee of C3 Collaborating for Health._ Competing interests: Nothing further to declare.

#JohnUpdike on #psoriasis
blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2014/09/05/richard-s...

Lunch with Lettrrs #johnupdike

I may just have outgrown this. I used to love, love, love #JohnUpdike until I just didn’t anymore. 3/6

#books 📚

Dear Bill: Letters From a Young John Updike to His Editor, William Maxwell To William Maxwell, writer and fiction editor at The New Yorker, who will later serve as Updike’s fiction editor at the magazine. ___________________________________________________ Sandy Island, N…

Dear Bill: Letters From a Young #JohnUpdike to His Editor, #WilliamMaxwell

“Elizabeth keeps falling down the steep stairs here. Send the checks. I need the money.”

#Literature #Biography

lithub.com/dear-bill-le...

Picture of the book cover with an overhead shot of two thin dugout canoes floating in the sea

My #RecentRead*
#Brazil by #JohnUpdike

*books I’ve really liked/loved

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.
---- #JohnUpdike

#collage #collageart #collageartist #art #artists #analogcollage #collageoftheday #handcut #papercollage #collagework #cutandpaste

The Beauty of the Book books are never words alone, plus the founding mothers of fairy tales

Thoughts on the beauty of the book, a great new indie, and the founding mothers of fairy tales, @janeharrington.bsky.social's, beautiful new book. #johnupdike @50watts.bsky.social #bookbeauty #illustratedbooks thehushandthehowl.substack.com/p/the-beauty...

Happy Monday!
Rabbit, rabbit! Happy September!

“The breezes taste
of apple peel.
The air is full
of smells to feel-
Ripe fruit, old footballs,
burning brush,
new books, erasers,
chalk, and such.”
—John Updike

I am taking a little break - see you 2026! #rabbitrabbit #september #johnupdike

Watching ‘Rick and Morty,’ the epi where they go to Blips-n-Chips. Rick pops a helmet on Morty to play a virtual game called ‘Roy,’ and I swear Roy’s story is basically Harry Angstrom’s life in the ‘Rabbit Run’ series by Updike.

#RickandMorty
#AdultSwim
#Sci-fi
#JohnUpdike
#RabbitRun

A rather chauvinistic view of marriage in the 1960s 7.5/10 #JohnUpdike #RabbitRun

35 años después, por fin estoy leyendo "Corre, Conejo". La historia envejeció mejor que yo. Me parece interesante cómo cambia la perspectiva con el tiempo.
En el blog cuento todo con más detalle.
maequelee.wordpress.com/2025/07/19/s... 

#unmaequelee #lectura #escritura #relectura #JohnUpdike

The mythical tale of Tristan and Isolde, retold. 7/10 #JohnUpdike #Brazil

“The sun is rich
And gladly pays
In golden hours,
Silver days,”

You can read the rest of John Updike’s poem, June, here: rainydaypoems.com/poems-for-ki...

#poetryfriday #poemoftheday #JohnUpdike #june

This is based on John Updike’s 1984 novel “The Witches of Eastwick” but there are several major changes like Van Horne being a devil, the way women get their powers and uhh.. the entire ending🙃
#SatMat #TheWitchesOfEastwick #JohnUpdike

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters. the final at-bat of Ted Williams’ career, as told by John Updike, 1960

If I had a time machine and didn't want to risk altering the future, I'd go to Fenway Park on September 28, 1960.

#baseball #boston #RedSox #mlb #johnupdike #greatness #quote #quotation #1960s