"John Updike is a terribly important American, given his
cultural and literary achievement,'' said William Pritchard, an
English professor at Amherst College who chronicled the writer's
life and work in "Updike: America's Man of Letters.'' "It's an
extraordinary thing that his university is where his papers have
landed.''
Lined up, the entire archive stretches 380 linear feet. It spans
1,500 books, including Updike's collection of his own work,
published in foreign languages and English, as well as books Updike
reviewed - with his pencil marks underlining the text, making notes
in the margins, or bracketing a particularly well-turned
phrase.
The papers also include photographs, files of brochures and
fliers used in his research, sample dust-jacket designs, and
letters from such literary figures as Kurt Vonnegut and Joyce Carol
Oates, as well as from fans.
The archive is so extensive because Updike was not only
prolific, he also was a perfectionist, said Leslie Morris, curator
of modern books and manuscripts at Houghton Library, which also
houses the papers of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Herman
Melville, T.S. Eliot, and Edward Hoagland, a classmate of
Updike's.
Updike, a longtime resident of Beverly Farms, was disciplined
and usually wrote for three hours every day. He produced multiple
drafts of his poetry and prose, revising the computer printouts
with pens and pencils, objects that Morris said the library has
also acquired.
A close examination of the manuscripts and correspondence
reveals the cultural transformations reflected in Updike's works.
In the first edition of "Rabbit, Run,'' the 1960 novel that
launched Updike into literary stardom, editors and publishers
pushed him to remove many of the sex scenes, considered too
explicit for the time, Morris said. The full text was not published
until 1964.
Once the papers are catalogued, any researcher can gain access
to the trove after registering with the library.
Updike, who entered Harvard on a scholarship, previously had
donated a small portion of his papers to the university, including
early short-story manuscripts written for the New Yorker;
"Telephone Poles,'' his early poetry collection; and nearly
complete documentation on the creation of "Rabbit, Run.''
For decades, the author deposited more of his papers, even golf
score cards, at Houghton Library. But the later papers were not
integrated with the rest of the collection, and Updike's permission
was required for any of the materials to be made available.
"There has always been this very personal connection between the
Harvard libraries and John Updike,'' Morris said.
In Harvard's alumni magazine, Updike described the fourth floor
of the Widener Library as one of his favorite spots on campus, a
place where students must walk around a set of metal shelves in
order to exit down the stairs.
"More than once, as an undergraduate, I missed this pivotal,
unmarked turn, and found myself faced with a blank wall, or with an
indignant PhD candidate dozing in his nook,'' Updike wrote. "How
like Harvard, I thought at the time, to set us these incidental
tests.''
For "Terrorist,'' his 2006 novel about the post-9/11 world - "a
milieu he was not necessarily familiar with,'' Morris said - Updike
worked in Widener to get the Islamic context correct. For the
character of Harry "Rabbit'' Angstrom, the car-dealer protagonist
in his tetralogy, Updike combed through books and articles about
automobiles and dealerships.
His archive includes a research file for "Rabbit at Rest,'' for
which he won the 1991 Pulitzer, that contains a brochure for a 1989
Toyota Cressida and an account of a visit to a Toyota dealership in
New Jersey that detailed the agency's operations.
[uit de Boston Globe]