John Updike

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 1995

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway on Desert Island Discs this week is the celebrated American writer John Updike. His novels include Rabbit Run (and three Rabbit follow-ups), Couples and The Witches of Eastwick.

He is both poet and historian, famous for charting the changes in post-war American society such as increasing marital breakdown and changing attitudes to death. He started his writing career by selling stories to the New Yorker magazine - something his mother had tried for years but had never succeeded. And he'll be telling Sue Lawley about how he overcame a bad stutter, how he has learnt to control his psoriasis and how now, aged 63, he finally feels normal; part of the gang he never was as a teenager.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Sing, Sing, Sing by The Benny Goodman Orchestra Book: Complete Works by Marcel Proust Luxury: Silken tent (for luxury, not survival)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 1995, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My costway this week is a writer. He was born the clever and only son of a
0:35.9	Pennsylvania school teacher and lived a quiet provincial life until he went to
0:40.1	Harvard at the age of 18. His desire to write drew him to the New Yorker magazine. He became
0:45.9	a staff writer there in the 50s, and in 1960 he published Rabbit Run. It was this book, together with the three later Rabbit novels which contributed to
0:55.2	his reputation as one of Modern America's most important writers. Couples, his novel about
1:00.8	marital infidelities in the 60s made him a millionaire and the
1:04.2	witches of Eastwick became a major feature film. Today at 63 he remains a witty,
1:10.8	thoughtful but always sure-footed observer of America's changing way of life.
1:16.1	Of his own life, he has this to say.
1:18.8	It's been a struggle to become normal, but I think I'm getting there.
1:23.0	He is John Updike.
1:25.0	What's abnormal about a decent God-fearing Pennsylvanian boy
1:30.0	who grows up to become a famous and prolific writer?
1:33.0	Well, I felt growing up that we were not quite normal,
1:36.0	but perhaps it was my mother's writing ambition,
1:39.0	which I thought was abnormal.
1:40.0	She did it,
1:43.0	this itch to be a writer and sure enough I caught it.
1:47.0	I was an only child and to that extent I missed some of the simulations that my
1:52.0	more prolific family friends had.
	...

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