The New Yorker:

An epistolary history of a fifty-five-year relationship with The New Yorker.

By John Updike

John Updike’s professional relationship with The New Yorker began in 1954, when he was twenty-two and the magazine published his poem “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums,” but his personal fascination began much earlier: he started submitting poems, drawings, newsbreaks, and other creative work to various magazines, including The New Yorker, at the age of thirteen. In his lifetime, Updike published more than a hundred and fifty poems and more than a hundred and sixty short stories in the magazine. In addition to working for the Talk of the Town section for two years in the mid-fifties, he contributed about three hundred and sixty book reviews. (The New Yorker was a family obsession: John’s mother, Linda Hoyer Updike, also published ten stories in the magazine, and his son David contributed six.) Updike’s final submission to The New Yorker was the poem “Endpoint,” which came out a few weeks after he died, of lung cancer, on January 27, 2009, at the age of seventy-six. These letters to and about The New Yorker are addressed to, among others, Updike’s family, in Plowville, Pennsylvania, a farming community near Reading; Mary Pennington, who was an undergraduate at Radcliffe when Updike was at Harvard, and whom he married in 1953; and the New Yorker editors Katharine White (whose husband was the writer E. B. White), William Maxwell, and David Remnick. The letters have, in most cases, been abridged. They will appear in full in “Selected Letters of John Updike,” edited by James Schiff, in October.

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