I'm Christopher Leighton, and this is open source, rediscovering John Updike in the afterlife of a great writer.

The selected letters of John Updike just published come to 800 pages of unguarded messages to his wives and lovers, to his mother and his editors.

We're turning to his kids for a fresh measure of the artist, who cracked

open the sexual revolution of the 1960s and lived it his own way. Couples was his breakthrough

novel and bestseller in 1968. His second son, Michael, and his second daughter, Miranda,

were adolescent witnesses to the story.

We're gathered in Michael's house on the north shore of Boston, the heart of Upteke country,

to resurface the glow in John Upteke's prose and the pleasure in his company.

Miranda and Michael Upteke, so happy to be reading these letters with you and hearing your sort of privileged reading.

I'm besotted with these letters, but I want to say what really draws me is the man inside them, the writer, the dad.

Start with the general view of the man you're meeting here.

Is this your dad?

Is he like your dad?

Does he measure up to your dad?

It actually shows more about him than I really understood.

Contrary to sort of public opinion,

he was not discussing his novels or his writing

or his religion with his children very often. I mean,

he discussed it with my mother and later, you know, Martha, my stepmother was sort of a

first reader for him. The early letters particularly, I mean the ones where he finally

gets into the New Yorker, gets a couple poems accepted, then a short story, and is back and forth

to Catherine White, I think, are just magnificent definitions of his maturity, his eloquence,

...