Giving Updike His Due

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

Just over twenty years ago now, John Updike gathered his essays on topics ranging from religion to art and his book reviews in his first non-fiction collection, Assorted Prose (1965). Since then, America’s most prolific man of letters has graced us roughly every eight years with a collection of his elegant, provocative, and incisive prose.

In his novels, short stories, poetry, and essays, Updike has been something of a chronicler of our cultural life during various moments in the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. These essays offer a stunning chronicle of our literature, as well as the literature in translation, and offer on their own an encouragement to pick up and read or to head to the local art museum and look.

Since most of these pieces have already appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times, why do we need yet another collection of Updike’s prose? Like it or not, Updike provides his own answer: “The human event in non-fiction considerations like these is the exchange, implicit if not explicit, between reader and writer one witness to the basic miracles of existence and consciousness offering his testimony to another such witness.”

This sixth collection—Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism (Knopf; $40)—as hefty as Odd Jobs (1991) and More Matter (1999), contains all the “accumulated weight of [Updike’s] daily exertions,” and gathers in one place all of his non-fiction from the past eight years. In three sections, Updike eloquently considers everything from literary biography and art to the new Modern Museum of Art, the philosophy of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, James Thurber, poker, five great novels of loving, the New Yorker, contemporary American and English fiction, and contemporary literature in translation.

For example, in a talk given in honor of the two hundredth anniversary of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Updike grouses that contemporary literary biographies too often masquerade as diagnostic tools, analyzing an author’s psyche but deflecting us from the author’s literary output. “If literary biography enhances our access to literature . . . then it does perform, I suppose, some useful work; but in deflecting our attention from the work itself . . . literary biography participates in the curious modern deconstructive neutering of art, which discredits its testimony and belittles its practitioners.”

Updike chronicles his own relationship to the New Yorker as book reviewer and then staff writer, praises its most important editor, William Shawn, and observes that the magazine “set a standard that still haunts the national literary awareness. Without the New Yorker in this century, every literate person’s sights would have been lowered.”

Although Updike’s literary opinions can often be testy, this volume reminds us that his prose much like Edmund Wilson’s in the early twentieth century sets our literary bar very high indeed.


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Henry can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it