John Updike
John Updike died today at age 76. He was one of the great American writers, and should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. That he did not is probably due to politics as much as anything. The Swedish Academy has not given a Nobel to an American writer since Toni Morrison in 1993. One suspects that disdain for American foreign policy during the George W. Bush years bumped the ever so slightly rightish Updike off the short list. And now it is too late, because the prize is not given posthumously. He joins Mark Twain on that list of American writers who could have and should have won, but didn't. Updike won two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards, which are nothing to sneeze at.
My one interaction with Updike came in early 1987, when my own book, Unseen Danger, a chronicle of the Centralia mine fire, had just been published. The Shamokin-Coal Township Public Library was having a fund-raising auction, and I came up with the idea of asking Pennsylvania writers to donate a signed first edition of one of their works. I wrote to Updike through Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher, hoping he would respond but not really expecting him to. Then one day I received a phone call from a quite-excited librarian. Updike had sent a signed copy of his latest novel--I honestly can't remember which one it was. As I recall, it went for a good bit of money. I kept the shipping envelope it came in, which had his handwritten return address on it.
Updike, as is well known, grew up in Reading and Shillington, Pa., and I always enjoyed his memory pieces about rural Pennsylvania that he wrote for Th New Yorker. I'll look forward to reading the story the Reading Eagle promises for Wednesday's edition.