So there was this interesting article about John Updike this week in the New York Times. Apparently when he died, he left behind a giant archive of all his work: early drafts, notes, research, and correspondence. The whole thing got donated to Harvard, his alma mater, where historians and other scholarly types are currently sorting through it. One interesting snippet published by The Times was this bit of a letter in which Updike describes the thrust of his writing, what he was trying to achieve in style and content:
We do not need men like Proust or Joyce; men like these are a luxury, an added fillip that an abundant culture can produce only after a more basic literary need has been fulfilled. This age needs rather men like Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pope; menwho are filled with the strength of their culture and do not transcend the limits of the their age, but, working within in the time, bring whatever is peculiar to their moment to glory. We need artist 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 many failings of my work, let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born.He was 19 years old when he wrote this.
