Due Considerations: Essays and CriticismA page-turning collection of essays and literary criticism on topics ranging from books, writers, poker, cars, faith, and the American libido—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. "[Updike is] one of the best essayists and critics this country has produced in the last century."—The Los Angeles Times Here Updike considers many books, 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. Reading Due Considerations is like taking a cruise that calls at many ports with a witty, sensitive, and articulate guide aboard—a voyage not to be missed. |
Contents
| 3 | |
| 14 | |
| 19 | |
GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS | 68 |
TRIBUTES AND SHORT TAKES | 92 |
INTRODUCTIONS | 121 |
To the German catalogue of an exhibit of photographs | 185 |
THURBER AND WHITE | 228 |
A Tribute to Saul Steinberg | 607 |
Introduction to a Section of The Complete Cartoons | 615 |
Introduction to Poor Arnolds Almanac | 621 |
A Reminiscence of Hyman Bloom | 627 |
Foreword to the Stackpole Books Edition of Buchanan Dying | 633 |
A Special Message for the Franklin Library Edition | 637 |
Note on The Walk with Elizanne for The Best American | 645 |
Foreword to My Own Bibliography | 651 |
AMERICAN FICTION | 251 |
ENGLISH FICTION | 300 |
IN ENGLISH BUT NOT ENGLISH | 334 |
IN OTHER TONGUES | 387 |
NONFICTION | 446 |
An Account of my Childhood Reading | 658 |
A Response to a Request from a Miss Gordon | 664 |
My Contribution to the NPR Series This I Believe | 670 |
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A. S. Byatt Academy American artist Baum beauty become biography Blind Assassin called century characters Charlotte's Web Christian church City dark death decades dreams E. B. White edited editor Efnisien Emerson English Ernest Hemingway Eudora Welty eyes father feel female fiction Flashman Fuchs Harold Ross Hawthorne Hawthorne's Hemingway Henry James hero heroine human hundred images imagination Jews John Karl Shapiro late later less letters literary lives look magazine Mark Twain modern mother movie museum nature never night novel Peter Carey play poems poet poetry poker prose published reader romance Scott Fitzgerald seems sense sexual Shapiro short stories Street style talk tells things Thoreau Thurber tion turned voice Walden White wife William Wizard woman words writing wrote York Yorker young