John Updike was among the most prolific writers of his generation, producing, novelist Orhan Pamuk wrote in The New York Times, an “encyclopedic array of the thousands of facets of human experience.” His vast corpus—spanning the famed Rabbit novels, copious short stories, and original, insightful sportswriting—has already filled seven Library of America series volumes and a special publication, each edited by Christopher Carduff. Below, writer Danny Heitman dives into the recently published Selected Letters of John Updike (Knopf, 2025) to unearth the fascinating correspondence between editor and author as they planned the LOA edition of Updike’s work.
By Danny Heitman
John Updike, who was one of America’s most prolific authors, wrote a lot of letters, too, as a new collection of his correspondence makes clear. Some of Updike’s last letters before his death at seventy-six in 2009 involved the Library of America volumes that would secure his work for future generations. Or so Updike’s fans have learned through Selected Letters of John Updike, recently published by Knopf.
By 2008, when Updike connected with then LOA editor Christopher Carduff about possible LOA publication of his work, he seemed unstoppable. Updike had risen to fame in the 1960s on the strength of his acclaimed novels, including the first of his Rabbit series that chronicled the adventures and travails of modern middle-class protagonist Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Long associated with The New Yorker, Updike was also an accomplished literary critic, memoirist, social commentator, and poet, producing a book a year for much of his career. Known for his gossamer style and clarity of observation, Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, and by the time LOA came calling, the rationale for his presence in its pantheon of curated classics was obvious.
First editions of The Poorhouse Fair (1959), Rabbit, Run (1960), The Centaur (1963), and Of the Farm (1965), all originally published by Alfred A. Knopf
In a September 5, 2008, letter to Carduff, Updike discussed LOA publication of his writings. The first order of business was a small project: a slender LOA edition of Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, Updike’s elegantly elegiac essay about Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams’s last game in Fenway Park on September 28, 1960, when Updike was a twenty-eight-year-old admirer in the stands. Updike offered to supplement the text with some related pieces about Williams. “I would be willing to write a brief preface to the whole potpourri,” he told Carduff, “and am happy to entertain any more format ideas that you have.”
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams
Updike seemed pleased to work with Carduff after seeing how well the editor had overseen the publication of a two-volume LOA edition of fiction by William Maxwell, the novelist, short story writer, and New Yorker editor whom Updike greatly admired. LOA’s Maxwell editions, Updike told Carduff, “are, together, beautiful, and tell the subliminal tale of his evolving ideas about fiction.”
In a 2008 review of the books for The New Yorker, Updike had heaped equally enthusiastic praise on the project. “Now his writing is what we still have of him,” Updike wrote of Maxwell, “and it warms the heart to hold almost all of his fiction in two sizable, relatively imperishable Library of America volumes.”
Updike was so taken with the Maxwell edition, in fact, that he asked Carduff for other books in the LOA canon: “I would love to have some of the recent L of A volumes, especially the Ashbery and the Bishop.” LOA had published landmark collections from poets John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop in 2008.
Updike, perhaps more than most writers, was alert not only to how a book read but how it looked.
A few weeks later, Updike was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. But even with the likelihood that he wouldn’t live much longer—or perhaps because of it—Updike powered through with more thoughts on Hub Fans, writing to Carduff on Christmas Day, 2008. “I am weak and growing weaker,” he noted, “but want to confide a few thoughts before fading away.” What follows are fairly detailed suggestions on how the book should be designed, including a worry that if produced in too small a format, Hub Fans might look puny on the shelf. “We don’t want it to look too trifling,” Updike told Carduff. “The illustrations seem fine,” he mentioned at another point, “though they need a little more size than the smallest format provides.”
Updike, perhaps more than most writers, was alert not only to how a book read but how it looked. His sense of aesthetics came from his lifelong fascination with drawing, painting, and illustration, which sustained his sideline career as an art critic.
As a child, he had wanted to be a cartoonist. In a late essay, Updike credited Big Little Books, a series of brightly illustrated stories for youngsters, as an early influence: “My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, or words.”
In a January 7, 2009, letter to Carduff, Updike included some parting suggestions on how, through LOA, his work might be presented to readers. The note touches mostly on technical issues involving, among other matters, which versions of certain material should be used. “But these problems are beyond me now; I just wanted to communicate what little I could, while I still can,” Updike wrote in closing. He died later that month, on January 27, 2009.
The Collected Stories
LOA’s Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu was published in 2009, and a two-volume LOA edition of Updike’s Collected Stories appeared in 2013. In a nod to Updike’s passion for the pictorial, the slipcase for the project prominently features a 1982 oil painting of Updike by Alex Katz from the National Portrait Gallery.
Updike’s confidence in Carduff’s editorial care developed into a special role after the author’s death. Carduff, who later became books editor at The Wall Street Journal, served as a trustee of Updike’s literary trust.
Carduff died suddenly on August 14, 2023, of a brain hemorrhage. His legacy includes his pivotal role on LOA’s Updike volumes, along with oversight of many other authors in the LOA series, including Jane Bowles, Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Virgil Thomson, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
The arrival of Selected Letters of John Updike is a reminder of how deeply Updike and Carduff cared for the English language. When Updike described Maxwell’s “unstinting editorial attention and gracious company,” he pointed to ideals that made Updike feel right at home within the Library of America.
Updike in 1986 (Ulf Andersen / Getty Images) and William Maxwell in 1961 ( Walter Daran / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty Images)
Danny Heitman, editor of Phi Kappa Phi’s Forum magazine, frequently writes about books for The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. He’s also a columnist for The Baton Rouge Advocate and the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
