Updike

Though Adam Begley's biography is the first on the writer, it's hard to see how it will be bettered. Thoroughly researched, written with intelligence, sympathy, and grace, it is a model of first-rate literary biography. . . . A complex, intimate portrait. --Dan Cryer, Newsday This is a generous tribute to an amusing and brilliant man. . . . Begley is a perceptive reader, illuminating the different alter egos who populate Updike's fiction. --The Financial Times The two-time Pulitzer winner couldn't have hoped for a biography more respectful -- or more critically attuned to his work -- than this one. Updike is gracefully written. . . . It contains revealing tales about Updike's work habits and publishing relationships that haven't been told before. --The San Francisco Chronicle Terrific. . . . Begley's book blends biography with a brilliant close read of Updike's work. . . . As insightful on the work as the life, it is a complicated and fascinating portrait of one of the great literary lives of the second half of the 20th century. --Salon On the evidence of this judicious new biography, John Updike recorded in his fiction the most painful events in his life. . . . Begley demonstrates that Updike was more complicated than the twinkly public persona he created for himself. --Robert Wilson, The American Scholar Not only has Begley written a convincing interpretative biography, one characterized by suavity, wit, and independent judgment throughout, he has also produced a major work of Updike criticism. . . . Displaying total command of his material, Begley does his author proud. --Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Honorable. . . . Updike's exquisite words flowed, some felt, too freely and too amiably. . . . It's one of the achievements of Begley's book that it so acutely demonstrates how it all, in fact, didn't come so easily. . . . Begley is a gifted literary critic. --Dwight Garner, The New York Times Fabulous. . . . Updike fans will enjoy Begley's marvelous biography, which is as much about the man as the writer. --Entertainment Weekly Begley seamlessly weaves biography and critical analysis throughout his book, much as Updike himself blurred autobiography and fiction. Updike is a monumental treatment of a towering American writer. --The New York Observer Begley is so much in command of his subject. . . . He has located the man behind the giant oeuvre. --Sam Tanenhaus, Prospect Begley is quiet, careful, self-effacing, and steady. . . . He amply shows us the strangeness and contradictions under the affable mask. --Hermione Lee, The New York Review of Books As a biographer, Begley has a great many strengths -- concision, eloquence, an eagle eye -- and few of the usual shortcomings. --The Wall Street Journal An insightful, compelling, discreet, and admirable biography. . . . In synthesizing a substantial amount of material through clear, intelligent prose, Begley does what I never thought possible: he writes a biography I wished were longer. --The Christian Science Monitor An insightful and meticulously researched book. . . . A sustained, very fine work of literary criticism. --The New Republic An exemplary biography, oceanically researched, full of insights. . . . Begley is even-handed in his judgments and is a fine writer himself, his supple and cadenced prose sometimes matching his subject's. --The Sunday Times (London) Adam Begley's careful and considerate biography illuminates all the right things about Updike, whose dramas were lived both privately and publicly. It's a social history in which one man's heart, mind, and talent came to resonate for an entire society. --Ann Beattie Adam Begley's brilliant evocation of our own literary giant should be required reading for Americans; Updike illumines a particular era with John Updike's own ferocity and tenderness. --Jayne Anne Phillips Adam Begley's Updike is a model of what a literary biography should be: rich with penetrating insights not only about the life but also about the work. It will enthrall long-time Updike fans and help create generations of new ones. --Francine Prose Adam Begley tells the story of John Updike's life in art with brilliant tautness, as if he were writing a novel. He has rendered a portrait of the writer that shimmers with truth. This is literary biography at its highest level of excellence. --Janet Malcolm Adam Begley has written an exemplary biography. . . . Respectful and sympathetic. . . . Any Updike fan will find it rewarding, as indeed will anyone who has enjoyed his work and any reader with an interest in modern American letters. --The Guardian A wonderful, wise biography, judicious and intimately revealing, and does full justice to the highly complex individual that was Updike. --William Boyd, Daily Mail's Best Books of the Year A sympathetic and thorough biography. . . . The more I read about Updike, the more I wanted to go back and read Updike.--USA Today A superb achievement. . . . A book that, in its evocation of a brilliant but flawed personality, conjured via the skillful deployment of just-so details and a subtle hint of haunting existential grace, is in some ways as rewarding as Updike's best fiction. --Scott Stossel, The Boston Globe A master storyteller comes to affably charming life in Begley's incisive biography. . . . Begley finds the truest reflection of the man in his work. --Vogue A highly literate illumination of a supremely literate human being. --Louis Menand, The New Yorker A hefty, thorough biography. . . . Begley does an impressive, conscientious job of marshaling evidence of Updike's many contradictions. --Jonathan Dee, Harper's A brilliant biography. . . . A delightfully rich book. . . . Highly readable. . . . The joys of Updike are based on discovering the autobiographical content of the tens of thousands of details that populate Updike's vast fictional universe. --Orhan Pamuk, The New York Times Book Review A beautifully written, richly detailed, and warmly sympathetic portrait of a great American writer. --Joyce Carol Oates 'You have to give it magic, ' John Updike explained of the stuff on the page; Adam Begley has done him proud, offering up Updike the man and Updike the writer in an exuberant, stunningly choreographed pas de deux. --Stacy Schiff