How to Become a Great Writer--John Updike's Secrets of Success

Until he died at 76 in 2009 John Updike led a very private life except for what he revealed about himself in his fifty-odd years of prolific writing--novels, poetry, essays, criticism. After his death, a meticulous archive of his life's work was left to Harvard's Houghton Library. The archive reveals much about Updike's life and his approach to writing. Included in the collection is his voluminous correspondence with his family, friends and editors. Updike's plan to be a writer began when he was in high school and continued as he worked on his first novel as a student at Harvard where rejections and criticism of his work by others didn't dampen his determination to write.

A small town public high school graduate competing with New England preppies, Updike was fearful of losing his scholarship and wrote home that he was "somewhat of a grind." He finished ninth in his class and graduated summa cum laude. The archive revealed that he continued to be a "grind" until his death in 2009. His work combined artistic intelligence and human understanding with meticulous research which provided authenticity to his work. For example, the archive contains pages from medical texts describing heart disease and surgery on which his clinically precise description of Rabbit Angstrom's angioplasty was based. He did similar research on car dealers for his passages about the family Toyota dealership in Rabbit Run and on basketball moves which enabled him to write convincingly about Rabbit's high school exploits on the basketball court.

The archive reveals disputes over Updike's publisher, Alfred Knopf's, urgings that he remove the explicit sex scenes from his first successful novel, "Rabbit Run." Updike correspondence showed how unhappy he was to be forced to tone down the sex scenes when Knopf refused to publish the book out of fear of legal censorship challenges. Not long after, obscenity standards were relaxed and the expurgated passages restored. Updike carefully pasted the restored portions into an early edition of the book which is now part of the Houghton Library collection.

Updike believed that a successful writer should pay close attention to his own time and place and not become infatuated with European modernist writers like Proust and Joyce, writing to his parents when he was only 19--

"This age needs rather men like Shakespeare or Milton, or Pope; men who are filled with the strength of their cultures and do not transcend the limits of their age, but, working within the times, bring what is peculiar to the moment to glory. We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic...Whatever the failings of my work, let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born."

Updike followed this early observation in his most successful novels which dealt with the life and times of Rabbit Angstrom whose life peaked as a star high school basketball player and was mostly downhill thereafter.

Materials in the archive belie Updike's reputation as a naturally fluent writer whose success came early and easily. They show that his work was scorned by Archibald MacLeish and other Harvard professors and the early rejections he received from The Atlantic and Harper's as well as his early successes at The Harvard Lampoon and The New Yorker. Updike meticulously retained and documented his many drafts and revisions which preceded the publication of his wititng and which produced the finished work which was so popular and critically acclaimed.

Updike's advice to aspiring writers may be summed up as follows: don't be discouraged by early rejections; write honestly about your time and place; include carefully detailed and researched descriptions; revise, rewrite and revise again until you have perfectly achieved your objective.

[I am indebted to the article linked below by Sam Tannenhaus in the NY Times, June 20, 2010. The article is interesting and worth reading in its entirety.]