Assorted Prose - John Updike - Vintage Paperback Book

Description: Vintage paperback book titled "Assorted Prose" by John Updike. It is a Fawcett Crest Edition, making it a collectible vintage paperback that features various prose works by the author. A Fawcett Crest Book R983 60 John Updike ASSORTED PROSE A RARE COLLECTION BY THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER Photo: Alfred A. Knopl ANY BOOK THAT BEARS JOHN UPDIKE'S SIGNATURE IS A LITERARY EVENT. HERE IS A STUNNING SELEC- TION OF ASSORTED PROSE BY THE YOUNG AUTHOR WHO HAS BEEN HAILED AS "THE MOST GIFTED WRITER OF HIS GENERATION." "ASSORTED PROSE... is the most vigorous work John Updike has published since his novel RABBIT, RUN." -The National Observer John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Penn- sylvania. He graduated summa cum laude from Har- vard in 1954 and spent a year in England on the Knox Fellowship, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, to which he has contributed short stories, essays, and poems. His novel The Centaur received the National Book Award for Fiction in 1964; in the same year Updike was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and traveled to the Soviet Union. He lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts, with his wife and four children. CONTENTS PARODIES The American Man: What of Him? 13 Anywhere Is Where You Hang Your Hat 15 What Is a Rhyme? 20 Drinking from a Cup Made Cinchy 24 On the Sidewalk 28 Why Robert Frost Should Receive the Nobel Prize 30 Confessions of a Wild Bore The Unread Book Route Alphonse Peintre Mr. Ex-Resident FIRST PERSON PLURAL Central Park No Dodo Voices in the Biltmore Our Own Baedeker 32 36 40 42 457502 Postal Complaints 55 Old and Precious 58 Spatial Remarks 60 Dinosaur Egg 63 Upright Carpentry Crush vs. Whip 65 65 Mtro Gate 67 Cancelled 69 Morality Play 72 Obfuscating Coverage 75 Bryant Park 76 John Marquand 78 Two Heroes 79 Doomsday, Mass. 81 Grandma Moses 83 xi xii CONTENTS Spring Rain Eisenhower's Eloquence Mostly Glass Three Documents Free Bee-hours Beer Can Modern Art The Assassination T. S. Eliot HUB FANS BID KID ADIEU FIRST PERSON SINGULAR The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood The Lucid Eye in Silver Town My Uncle's Death Outing: A Family Anecdote Mea Culpa: A Travel Note Eclipse REVIEWS Poetry from Downtroddendom Snow from a Dead Sky 89 101 119 148 157 164 169 172 175 178 Franny and Zooey 181 184 Credos and Curios 186 Beerbohm and Others 198 Rhyming Max 204 No Use Talking 208 Stuffed Fox 208 Honest Horn 212 Faith in Search of Understanding 219 Tillich 220 More Love in the Western World 234 A Foreword for Young Readers 237 Creatures of the Air 242 Between a Wedding and a Funeral 245 How How It Is Was Grandmaster Nabokov 248 FOREWORD IN THE TEN YEARS that I have written for a living. I have published a certain amount of non-fictional prose; this book collects all of it that I thought anyone might like to reread. Several baseball fans have asked me to put the "Williams article" in permanent form. My wife's aunt once expressed a fondness for a paragraph of mine on Grandma Moses. Another woman declared herself peculiarly moved by "The Unread Book Route." Otherwise, these pieces have been assembled here on my own initiative, as one more attempt to freeze the flux of life into the icy permanence of print. Concerning the first section: I wish that there had been enough parodies and humorous sketches to make a book of their own. My first literary idols were Thurber and Benchley and Gibbs; these few feuilletons are what remains of my ambition to emulate them. They were written between 1956 and 1961, when I was young at heart. I leave it to the percipient reader to deduce, where appropriate, that Eisenhower was still President and that Robert Frost was still alive. From August of 1955 to March of 1957 The New Yorker paid me to gad about, to interview tertiary celebrities, to peek into armories, and to write accounts of my mild adventures for its insatiable department "The Talk of the Town." Who, after all, could that indefatigably fascinated, perpetually peripatetic "we" be but a collection of dazzled farm-boys? When New York ceased to support my fantasies, I quit the job and the city, though from time to time since, revisiting, I have made contributions to "Talk," as well as intermittent editorial "Notes and Comment." In sifting through the yellow- ing batch of my anonymous offerings, I have eliminated all those that, by mention of brand names, might give comfort to any public-relations outfit and tried to retain those para- graphs with some flavor, touch, or lyric glimpse of the city in them. The long "fact" pieces on pigeons and Antarctica I kept because they represent some honest research work. "Old and Precious," besides being typical of the "visit" pieces I did by the dozen, supplied some crockery to a poorhouse fair of my own. The editorial comments seem a kind of collaboration between my own voice and a voice more confident than mine -more assured of the liberal verities, more serenely facetious. "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" was a five days' labor of love executed and published in October 1960. For many years, especially since moving to greater Boston, I had been drawing sustenance and cheer from Williams' presence on the horizon, and I went to his last game with the open heart of a fan. The events there compelled me to become a reporter. Without much altering the text, I have added, as footnotes, some additional information not then available to me. The fourth section contains six items that at the least have as common denominator a first-person narrator. The first and longest was composed at the invitation of Mr. Martin Levin, for a collection of seven boyhood accounts, one to a decade; the number of boyhoods dropped to five, but a book did appear, published by Doubleday, and quickly disappeared. Howard Lindsay, Harry Golden, Walt Kelly, and William K. Zinsser were the other boys. Though there are some tenderly turned passages, my reminiscence in general, I fear, has the under cooked quality of prose written to order, under insufficient personal pressure. The next two pieces, about uncles, are really short stories that took so long to get into print that they lost their place in line and must lodge forever here. The publication history of "The Lucid Eye in Silver Town" is especially devious. Written, rejected, and set aside in 1956, it was revived and revised eight years later for a Saturday Evening Post "Special New York Issue" and, shortly thereafter, for reasons that a trip to Russia did not clear up, was reprinted, abridged, in the June 21, 1964, number of Pravda. The other three accounts do not claim to be untrue. The eclipse occurred on July 20, 1963. Of the books reviewed, some (the Sillitoe, the Aiken, the Agee, the Hughes) sought me out while others (the Salinger, the Spark, the Nabokov) were sought out by me. The Barth article, like the Williams piece, was written in acknowledgment of a debt, for Barth's theology, at one point in my life, seemed alone to be supporting it (my life). The theory of thyme * In the matter of footnotes: notes added in the preparation of this book publication are indicated by asterisks and allied typographic devices; footnotes originally part of a text (eg, the Eliot parody) are numbered. set forth in "Rhyming Max" is possibly totally wrong-headed; though on rereading it I was, curiously, persuaded anew. Mr. Warner Berthoff, a professorial friend, suggested to me on a postcard that pronounced meter and rhyme are dancelike; and perhaps there is a rigidity which is not comic, the rigidity of ecstasy, of rite. But rhyme, I would say, with our present expectations of language, aspires to this intensity vainly. On the other hand, my expressed doubts about de Rougemont's theories of Occidental love have faded in importance for me. His overriding thesis seems increasingly beautiful and pertinent; corroborating quotations leap to my eyes wherever I read: Some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of libido to its height; and at all periods of history, wherever natural barriers in the way of satisfaction have not sufficed, mankind has erected conventional ones in order to be able to enjoy love. -Freud, "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life" (1912) Once upon a time there was a little fish who was bird from the waist up and who was madly in love with a little bird who was fish from the waist up. So the fish-bird kept saying to the bird-fish: "Oh, why were we created so that we can never live together? You in the wind and I in the wave. What a pity for both of us!" And the bird-fish would answer: "No, what luck for both of us. This way we'll always be in love because we'll always be separated." -Vassilis Vassilikos, "The Well" (1964) Beauty is the marking-time, the stationary vibration, the feigned ecstasy of an arrested impulse unable to reach its natural end. -T. E. Hulme, epigraph for the poem "Mana Aboda" (c. 1912) Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving toward a phantom. We can love only what we create. -Paul Valry, "A Fond Note on Myth" (1928)

Price: 8.88 USD

Location: San Francisco, California

End Time: 2025-02-09T06:50:01.000Z

Shipping Cost: 4.63 USD