Book
Due considerations : essays and criticism
Edition
1st ed.
Publication Information
New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
Physical Description
xxii, 703 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
Summary
John Updike's sixth collection of essays and literary criticism opens with a skeptical overview of literary biographies, proceeds to five essays on topics ranging from China and small change to faith and late works, and takes up, under the heading "General Considerations," books, poker, cars, and the American libido. The last, informal section of Due Considerations assembles more or less autobiographical pieces--reminiscences, friendly forewords, comments on the author's own recent works, responses to probing questions. In between, many books are considered, some in introductions--to such classics as Walden, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Mabinogion--and many more in reviews, usually for The New Yorker. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the five Biblical books of Moses come in for appraisal, along with Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Wizard of Oz. Contemporary American and English writers--Colson Whitehead, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Norman Rush, William Trevor, A. S. Byatt, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwan--receive attentive and appreciative reviews, as do Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Günter Grass, and Orhan Pamuk. In factual waters, Mr. Updike ponders the sinking of the Lusitania and the "unsinkable career" of Coco Chanel, the adventures of Lord Byron and Iris Murdoch, the sexual revolution and the advent of female Biblical scholars, and biographies of Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Marcel Proust, and Søren Kierkegaard.--From publisher's description.
Contents
- On literary biography
- Back from China
- A sense of change
- The future of faith
- Invisible cathedral
- Late works
- A case for books
- Looking back to now
- The tried and the treowe
- A Layman?s scope
- Against angelolatry
- Ten epochal moments in the American libido
- Five great novels about loving
- Hydrophobia
- My life in poker
- My life in cars
- The academy as it was and is: a talk, with slides
- West 155th Street
- The New Yorker
- William Shawn
- William Maxwell
- Wright Morris
- Eudora Welty
- Ernest Hemingway
- Ted Williams
- November 22, 1963
- J.F.K., Jr.
- September 11, 2001
- To the Everyman's Library edition of The Mabinogion
- To The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- To Walden, by Henry David Thoreau: 150th Anniversary Edition
- To The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
- To The Diary of Adam and Eve and Other Adamic Stories, by Mark Twain
- To Seven Men, by Max Beerbohm
- To The Rich Boy, three stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- To The Eighth Day, by Thornton Wilder
- To The Golden West: Hollywood Stories, by Daniel Fuchs
- To Karl Shapiro: Selected Poems
- To Elephant House, or, The Home of Edward Gorey, photographs and text by Kevin McDermott
- To Christmas at The New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art
- To the German catalogue of an exhibit of photographs by Ulrich Mack of the Ipswich marshes
- The great I am
- Big dead white man
- Oz is us
- Hide and seek
- Introduction to the Perennial Edition of Is Sex Necessary? (2004) ? Thurber?s art
- Magnum Opus
- Introduction to a New Edition of The Letters of E. B. White (2006).
- These trashy years
- Coming home
- Tote that ephemera ? Dog?s tears
- One-way street
- Red loves Rex, alas
- Angel-tits and Hellmouth
- Mind/body problems-I
- Mixed messages
- The great game gone
- A cloud of dust
- Property and presumption
- A same-sex idyll
- Fairy tales and Paradigms
- Stonewalling toffs and gnomic blood
- Flesh on flesh
- Absent presences
- Mind/body problems-II
- Flashy to the rescue
- Home care
- Love and loss on Zycron
- Dangerous into beautiful
- Both rough and tender
- Papery passions
- Blood and paint
- A case of Deutschfeindlichkeit
- The story of himself
- Pre-?gay? gray
- Paradises lost
- Dying for love
- The lone sailor ?- Two?s a crowd
- Mind/Body Problems-III
- Suppressed atrocities
- Murder among the miniaturists
- Arabesques of ambivalence
- Subconscious tunnels
- Bitter bamboo
- Groaning shelves
- Can Eve be reprieved?
- Was sex necessary?
- Chanel No. 1
- The poor babies
- Drawn to gypsies
- Survivor/believer
- Twice collected
- Mud and flames
- Incommensurability
- The man in bed
- Poet on the fault line
- No brakes
- A natural writer
- Young Iris
- One obstinate survivor on another
- Metropolitan art
- Deceptively conceptual ? Dürer?s passions
- The thing itself
- The imaginary builder.
- -- A tribute to Saul Steinberg
- Introduction to the world of William Steig
- Introduction to a section of the complete cartoons of The New Yorker
- The would-be animator
- Introduction to Poor Arnold?s Almanac
- Introduction to Chip Kidd: Book One: 1986-2006
- Foreword to the catalogue of My Father?s House (Will Barnet)
- A reminiscence of Hyman Bloom
- Saint Nick: essay for The Catalogue of George Nick: A Retrospective
- Foreword to the MFA Publications edition of Just Looking
- Foreword to the Stackpole Books Edition of Buchanan Dying
- A ?Special Message? for the Franklin Library Edition of Gertrude and Claudius
- Prefacio to Poemas 1953-1999
- Foreword to Humor in Fiction
- Foreword to the Easton Press edition of Licks of Love
- Note on ?Bech Noir? for The Best American Mystery Stories 1999
- Note on ?Personal Archeology? for The Best American Short Stories 2001
- Note on ?The Walk with Elizanne? for The Best American Short Stories 2004
- Comment on ?Your Lover Just Called,? in the anthology This Is My Best
- Recurrent Characters
- An Interview Conducted by Henry Bech
- Foreword to My Own Bibliography
- Three Brits (Tina Brown, Frank Kermode, André Deutsch)
- An account of my childhood reading
- A response to a request from Michael Dirda
- A response to GQ?s request for My Favorite Year of the Century
- Summer love
- The beautiful
- A response to a request from a Miss Gordon
- Early employments and inklings
- My Philadelphia
- A response to the question ?Why Do I Live in New England??
- A response to a request for a memory of Harvard dorm life
- Statement for There Is No Other Story: Ethics, Literature, and Theory
- My contribution to the NPR series This I Believe.