John Updike: Dreams from My Mother

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Academy of Achievement

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4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2019

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John Updike used his unique literary talents to peel back the layers of middle-class American life, exposing its less-than-placid exterior. He was one of the most prolific and esteemed American writers of his generation, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his "Rabbit" novels but was as well known for his stories and essays and works of literary criticism. He talks here about his very beginnings in a small Pennsylvania town, and about his mother, who inspired him with her own efforts to get published. Updike also discusses his storied association with The New Yorker, which began the month he completed college and lasted until his death in 2009. And he describes the nitty-gritty of his daily writing routine. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2019

Transcript

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0:00.0	John Updyke sat in a rented one-room office each morning for decades, typing stories and essays and poems and novels on a manual typewriter.
0:13.0	In a piece for the Guardian, he once wrote,
0:15.0	I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke,
0:20.0	one box after another in that room where my only duty was to describe reality as it
0:27.0	had come to me, to give the mundane its beautiful do. Here's how we put it several years later
0:34.5	to the Academy of Achievement.
0:36.3	Well, if in a democracy and in the 20th
0:40.9	and now the 21st century if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people
0:47.2	and the conflicts which struggles the issues that engage ordinary people, then you're produced to writing about spectacular
0:57.0	unreal people.
0:58.0	Adventures. And the trick about fiction, as I see it, is to make an unadventurous circumstance The
1:03.0	I see it is to make an unadventurous circumstance seem adventurous
1:06.0	to make it excite the reader,
1:08.0	either with its truth or with the fact that
1:10.0	there's always a little more than goes on.
1:13.0	There's multiple levels of reality.
1:15.6	As we walk through even a boring day,
1:18.3	we see an awful lot and feel an awful lot.
1:20.6	And to try to say some of that seems more worthy than cooking up thrillers.
1:26.7	Not that Updike disliked thrillers to the contrary, but his very substantial contribution
1:32.2	to American literature during the second half of the 20th century and a decade into this one was to illuminate the everyday life and turmoil of white middle class America.
1:45.0	Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, John Updike,
	...

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