Picked-up Pieces [Hardcover]

John Updike (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins Distribution Services (March 18, 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0233967494
• ISBN-13: 978-0233967493
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,390,713 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Customer Reviews

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vintage Updike, September 13, 2009

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Great Faulkner's Ghost (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Picked-Up Pieces (Hardcover)

It's a shame that these earlier essays by Updike have gone out of print. While the style is slightly more "academic" than what would see in his next collection, Hugging the Shore, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the readings are no less startling in their breathtaking insights and sympathetic readings of a wide range of authors and their works. Updike is so at ease with all aspects of the language and the culture that reading him is like a guided tour into the greatest pleasure and deepest instincts of the the literary terrain of the time. Highly recommended, and a vote to reprint these essays for our own time.