{"product_id":"updike","title":"Updike","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn this eye-opening, authoritative biography, Adam Begley offers a captivating portrait of John Updike, the author who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, and who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing \"middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities.\"\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eUpdike explores the stages of the writer's pilgrim's progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Begley examines how Updike's fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life - including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his firsthand experience of the \"adulterous society\" he was credited with exposing in the bestselling novel Couples. With a sharp critical sensibility, Begley probes Updike's best-loved works and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eCandid, intimate, and utterly absorbing, Updike is a masterful biography of a national treasure whose writing continues to resonate like no one else's.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harper Collins","offers":[{"title":"Bargain","offer_id":42866093949008,"sku":"9780061896460B","price":7.49,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0592\/8173\/5760\/files\/9780061896460-l.jpg?v=1787938436","url":"https:\/\/bookoutlet.com\/fr\/products\/updike","provider":"Book Outlet","version":"1.0","type":"link"}