The Early Stories: 1953-1975

by John Updike

“He is a religious writer; he is a comic realist; he knows what everything feels like, how everything works. He is putting together a body of work which in substantial intelligent creation will eventually be seen as second to none in our time.”
—William H. Pritchard, The Hudson Review, reviewing Museums and Women (1972)

A harvest and not a winnowing, The Early Stories preserves almost all of the short fiction John Updike published between 1954 and 1975.

The stories are arranged in eight sections, of which the first, “Olinger Stories,” already appeared as a paperback in 1964; in its introduction, Updike described Olinger, Pennsylvania, as “a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid pattern.” These eleven tales, whose heroes age from ten to over thirty but remain at heart Olinger boys, are followed by groupings titled “Out in the World,” “Married Life,” and “Family Life,” tracing a common American trajectory. Family life is disrupted by the advent of “The Two Iseults,” a bifurcation originating in another small town, Tarbox, Massachusetts, where the Puritan heritage co-exists with post-Christian morals. “Tarbox Tales” are followed by “Far Out,” a group of more or less experimental fictions on the edge of domestic space, and “The Single Life,” whose protagonists are unmarried and unmoored.

Of these one hundred three stories, eighty first appeared in The New Yorker, and the other twenty-three in journals from the enduring Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s to the defunct Big Table and Transatlantic Review . All show Mr. Updike’s wit and verbal felicity, his reverence for ordinary life, and his love of the transient world.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, Classics, American, Short Story Collection, Literary Fiction

864 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2003

About the author

John Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.

He died of lung cancer at age 76.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Early Stories

John Updike needs little introduction as a giant of 20th century American literature. In this very lengthy collection most of the stories are no longer than a dozen or so pages. Yet Updike can and does convey so much and does so expeditiously. As a result many of the scenes are set up in just a few paragraphs.

There may be authors who write more dramatically like Tennessee Williams. Or writers who evoke more visceral responses in their readers like Faulkner. Or futurists like Bradbury who are more imaginative. But no author is better than Updike at crystallizing thoughts and selecting the perfect words to sketch stories about some seemingly mundane events in life.

These are the short stories in this collection that I especially enjoyed.

1. Pigeon Feathers

A story about a boy and his family’s move to a farm in Pennsylvania. The boy, David, has an orderly mind and struggles to make sense of life and death and religion. One day David’s mother asks him to shoot a family of pigeons that are making a mess of the barn. He does his job but is conflicted. Through this event and his readings he has arrived at a secular view of the world. This is one of Updike’s most famous stories. It feels autobiographical and is littered with nostalgia.

2. Friends from Philadelphia

The theme is one of class struggle. A sixteen year old boy needs to buy a bottle of wine for his parents’ dinner party with guests coming that night from Philadelphia. Unable to buy at the liquor store, the boy resorts to asking a neighbor girl’s father to buy it for him. The man, sensitive about his blue collar background, agrees but wants to show off his new car first.

3. The Christian Roommates

Two boys from very different Christian backgrounds have become roommates at Harvard during their freshman year. The story is pretentious at times but it is a fascinating glimpse of the early ‘50s Ivy league scene. The country boy (probably Updike) arrives at Harvard and tries to navigate this new world of the privileged few leaving him conflicted with both disdain and jealousy.

4. How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time

What is on display in this story here? This is a wonderful exhibition of Updike’s descriptive writing prowess. A man is on vacation with his family after a long day of driving and pulls into a motel. He proceeds to size up the clerk and observe seemingly meaningless details of his surroundings. He relishes the many nuances of American life but simultaneously bemoans the fact that we are no longer mysterious or interesting. A great story about how we all simultaneously possess self-confidence and doubt and hold conflicting thoughts in our heads.

5. When Everyone was Pregnant

A poignant reflection on a happy moment in a husband’s past.

6. The Gun Shop

An obnoxious fourteen year old boy receives a gun for his birthday but one of the pins breaks soon thereafter. The boy throws a tantrum so his father and son take it to a gun shop. While the owner works on fixing the gun another old man tells war stories - some probably not true. The father of the boy gets annoyed at the old man’s war stories. An insightful inter-generational story that — true to Updike’s literary style — seems more like non-fiction than fiction.

7. The Tarbox Police

A sketch of this fictional town’s police force and some of the secrets that they know and many they never wanted to know. Not much of a plot but just a great piece of writing.

8. A&P

One of Updike’s most famous stories and the scene is drawn exquisitely and immediately recognizable. Our protagonist is a teenage boy working as a clerk at the A&P in a beach town. He notices two teenage girls picking up snacks at the store in their bathing suits. But when the store manager is rude to the girls for wearing inappropriate attire the boy becomes angry.

9. The Deacon

An insightful story about a new church deacon and his responsibilities. And what he might be thinking about while listening to the sermon. A wonderful character sketch.

10. The Taste of Metal

This is probably the most hedonistic story in this collection but it is not so salacious. There are three characters in the car. Richard the husband is driving the car and Joan the wife is in the backseat. Eleanor the recently separated wife of a bond trader is in the passenger seat. Richard and Joan just met Eleanor at a party. No one seems to be acting appropriately as Richard thinks about kissing a willing Eleanor. Joan comments on Richard’s dangerous driving on the icy roads and we know that drunk driving is never a good idea.

4.5 stars.

[Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection is all the short stories, except for four, that John Updike wrote in the years 1953-1975. He chose the end of this period to align with the end of his first marriage. Many of his stories are taken from his life, as was his style, reflecting the period and events of his life at a point in time. It took me 19 months to read this collection. With many short story collections, I can read a story per day or every few days. In this case I found myself reading these stories in chunks, focusing on them for a period, then losing interest and leaving them alone for months at a time. Part of the problem was the length of the collection: 103 stories and 833 pages, and part of the problem was the content. I loved some of the stories, disliked some and found a bunch to be of middling interest; for me, the collection was a mixed bag. I rated each of the stories as I read them and ended up with these results:

5 stars: 23
4 stars: 33
3 stars: 33
2 stars: 12
1 star: 2

The collection included 13 of the 19 stories about Richard and Joan Maple. I enjoyed them and found most of them to be excellent. The collection also included one Henry Bech story; while I did not find this story captivating, I was intrigued enough by the Henry Bech character to potentially read more of these stories in the future. A few of my favorites in this collection were:

Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?
The Doctor’s Wife
Incest
Unstuck

Updike’s best stories are about complex adult relationships, usually focusing on a husband and wife. Many of the stories involve extramarital sex or affairs. I have read quite a bit by Updike over the years. I have concluded that I enjoy some of what he writes (the Rabbit novels especially) but not all.

I wanted to share a thought about comprehensive collections of short stories, such as this one, meaning either everything that an author wrote during a period or everything an author ever wrote. These comprehensive collections often get very high ratings on GR. This surprises me because the collections of this type that I have read are often a mixture of very good stories and not so good ones. I imagine storytelling to be a learning process at which you get better with practice. Either an author must destroy early efforts, which is impossible if something has been published, or the complete works are going to reflect that learning process. Also, as in Updike’s case, an author is going to experiment and some of those experiments are not going to succeed. If a collection of short stories is rated very high, I guess I expect all the stories to be of very high quality or at least the average to be of high quality. That has not been my experience. I often find that the ratings of these collections do not reflect what I think of as the average quality of the stories. I might consider this a matter of taste, as I do with a novel when my assessment differs from many, but this seems to happen too often with these comprehensive short story collections to be attributed to a difference in taste. My thought is that some readers focus on the great stories when giving a comprehensive collection a rating.

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been working my way through this for years now. It's never on top of my "current reading" stack, but whenever I turn to it I read something beautiful and keenly-observed.

[Roxy Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although there are many amazing short stories in Updike's collection most of my favorites come from the section titled, "The Tarbox Tales" A&P is by far my favorite because Sammy is such a honest character and Updike perfectly depicts the mind of a teenage boy in this story. Instead of critiquing the book as whole, I decided to focus on one specific story.

“IN WALKS these three girls in nothing but bathing suits,” is perhaps one of the best opening lines to a story I have ever read. John Updike writes with such humor and wit you can’t help but laugh. In A&P he doesn’t leave out a single description, everything is detailed from the types of items you can find at the A&P to the types of people that shop there, mostly sheep muttering grocery lists to themselves. Sammy notices every minute detail about the three girls that walk in that is both provocative and respectful at the same time. He is careful to mention as well as his coworker Stokesie, that they are nowhere near a beach, so girls wearing nothing but swimsuits are going to attract a crowd by default. Updike pulls off the life of a bored teenager such as Sammy with such angst, flawlessly. Sammy knows the ins and outs of one thing and that is working at a grocery store, more importantly working at the A&P. Sammy is only nineteen, lives in a small town where not a lot happens, he is so bored with his life he treats his job like it is a game, making it clear that he wants more out of it, than to simply be a cashier at the local A&P. Updike explains Sammy’s boredom with such vivid imagery and playful sounds, that you can hear the arcade that Sammy creates in his mind. The isles of store are like slots on pin-ball table and he plays guessing games on where the customers will show up next. “The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn’t know which tunnel they’d come out of.” The cash register is a musical instrument, “Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat).” For a character as bored as Sammy these three girls are the highlight to his day, probably his week; while he looks at them he studies them. Updike uses the kind of language that any teenage boy with promiscuous thoughts and tendencies would use. When Sammy looks at these girls he is thinking of one thing, their bodies, but really he is only interested in one of the girls, the prettiest one, the one he calls “Queenie” because she seems to lead the rest of the group, for some reason she is of special interest to him. “I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking.” A&P is full of descriptions, but what I like best about this story is that the narrator is telling us this story in the present so he already knows how it is going to end. Throughout the story Updike breaks it up into sections of what will happen next, for example, “Now here comes the sad part of the story,” “Then everybody’s luck begins to run out.” I normally don’t care for these kinds of transitions in a story, but Updike works them in flawlessly with Sammy’s character and they don’t fell out of place but flow with the story. The realization at the end where Sammy tries to be the hero to the girls is what brings the story together, “I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.” This sort of epiphany works well because he just reminds us that sometimes we have to do things like work at the A&P.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

After I read one of these stories, my wife sometimes asks, "So, what was it about?" "Well," I respond, "This guy came home from work," or "a couple had a friend over for dinner."

While the plots in these stories are insubstantial, it is the detail that makes the difference. Kind of like in our own lives. As one of the stories states, "Just a piece of turf torn from a meadow becomes a gloria when drawn by Durer. Details. Details are the giant's fingers."

Updike's stories are full of these details. They transform the simplest of events into something grand and beautiful. I find myself paying more attention to the details in my own life. This was his goal. In this collection's introduction, Updike talks about sitting in his one-room office above a restaurant. He smoked nickel cigarillos while crafting stories on his typewriter, stacking the empty boxes on his desk. He makes this comparison: "I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke, one box after another, in that room, where my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me--to give the mundane its beautiful due."

[Andy Newton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve kept this book on my nightstand for the past several years, picking it up from time to time. Updike writes gorgeous prose, and his protagonists—almost exclusively men, admittedly—are deeply flawed and complex. They live on the page, even if his female characters tend not to. (It’s a difficult problem to suss out, though; to what extent the author is aware of this trend. At times, this sort of objectification seems to be a deliberate product of the protagonist’s perspective; stories of narcissistic men who view others only as satellites in their orbit.) His stories, little snapshots of life, have a unique way of capturing elements of the human experience on a granular level.

One strange thing of note about this anthology is that the stories are organized thematically. I would’ve preferred to read them in chronological order, so I could better appreciate the author’s progression in style and subjects of interest. Also of note are the stories featuring the Maples, a hilarious, bickering petit-bourgeois couple living in a well-to-do suburb of Boston. If this tome seems intimidating, I would recommend picking up a volume of just those stories.

[Sheli Ellsworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Updike's early works were woefully undervalued by critics. I found the prose difficult in places, but never derivative. In a style that is now popular with contemporary memoirists, Updike catalogs events with an intense passion for details that is the bane of modern novelists. I found the stories thoughtful and inspiring. However, his style is bereft of what we would consider "an arc", but the characters are served up as a garnish on a thoughtful entree.

[Adeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would like to thank John Updike for the Maples. I feel naughty as I get to look so unabashedly into two people's private lives.
He lays a marriage out and he lays it out thick.
His keen observations on love, marriage, and religion are just enough to get anyone thinking about their own life and belief systems. "Pigeon Feathers" is a personal favorite.

[Old Man JP · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over 100 short stories, in 833 pages, written in John Updike's impeccable prose. His writing has a subtle elegance that reads so smoothly the reader can easily overlook his elegance unless they really pay attention. An example is the opening sentences in a story titled "Lifeguard" that reads: "Beyond doubt, I am a splendid fellow. In the autumn, winter, and spring, I execute the duties of a student of divinity; in the summer, I disguise myself in my skin and become a lifeguard". The story goes on about him rationalizing his lust for women in bikinis. Some of the other stories that stood out most to me were:
" Pigeon Feathers" in which a mother makes a boy shoot the pigeons in the barn rafters against his wishes and afterwards she realizes that she won't hear their soothing cooing again and he sees the beautifully colored feathers and realizes that the creator won't allow him to live forever if he is going to destroy his creations.
"The Christian Roomates" a young man is following in his fathers footsteps to become a doctor by enrolling in Harvard but is given a very strange roommate.
"Nevada" a man has gone to Reno to pick up his two daughters and drives through Nevada while his ex-wife goes on a honeymoon.
"A&P" three girls in bathing suits walk into a grocery store.
"Marching Through Boston" a woman involved in civil rights talks her somewhat racist husband into marching with her in Boston.
There were numerous excellent short stories in this collection with very few that weren't, making this a very good read.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful. Updike is a wordsmith and truly captures the moments that make a life and give us pause, make us remember, regret, long for, and love. Only sometimes self indulgent but I give him a pass for all his other great qualities.

[Greg Schumaker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writing so good it makes you say “Why bother trying to write anything else?”

[Tim O'Leary · Rating 5 out of 5]

At 103 short stories and 833 pages, this is a big, fat glorious smorgasbord of a collection--not a selection, as Updike intones in the forward, since selections typically associate themselves with writers' works who have passed on--of marvelous fictional accounts (poetry really) that were written on a manual typewriter for The New Yorker between the years of 1953 and 1975. "A heedless broad Mississippi of print, in which my contributions among so many others appeared; they serviced a readership, a certain demographic episode, now passed into history--all those birch-shaded Connecticut mailboxes receiving, week after week, William Shawn's notion of entertainment and instruction. Those first checks, in modest hundreds, added up and paid for my first automobile. Without which I would've had to walk. I would have existed, no doubt, in some sort, but not the bulk of these stories. I found no lack of joy in rereading them, though it arrives by the moment and not by the month, and no lack of affection and goodwill among characters caught in the human plight, the plight of limitation and mortality. Art hopes to sidestep mortality with feats of attention, of harmony, of illuminating connection, while enjoying, it might be said, at best a slower kind of mortality: paper yellows, language becomes old-fashioned, revelatory human news passes into general social wisdom. The real America seemed to me "out there." Out there was where I belonged, immersed in the ordinary, which careful explication would reveal to be extraordinary. Where in a one-room office I rented in Ipswich, between a lawyer and a beautician, above a cozy corner restaurant, my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me--to give the mundane its beautiful due." This is it. As good as it gets. The culmination of months of reading, sipping sentences, breathing them in, savoring each and rereading them to ponder and absorb Updike's craft more fully. You just don't rush a book like this. Because anything remotely like it simply doesn't come along but upon the rarest of occasions.

[Sean Lyon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Via Updike's creativity, thoughtfulness, and intense knowledge of the life of midcentury elites in New England, he reminds us (often in pointedly painful ways, but with occasional soaring aspiration) once again what it means to be human. In this book, Updike's creative mastery is on full, polarizing display.

[Emil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jag har den svenska utgåvan, som är ett urval av ca 15 av dessa samlade noveller, och jag läste kanske halva boken. Jag recenserar alltså inte originalet som är på uppemot 900 sidor. Hur som helst, ingen läser väl Updike i dag, men han är en mästare på det korta formatet, och jag har som nyårslöfte att läsa några novellsamlingar.

För det mesta handlar det om förhållandet mellan man och kvinna och att bli vuxen. Inga konstigheter där inte.

[Caren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adulterous longing, death obsessions, driving on the highway in 60s cars and picking up hitchhiking sailors: if these are your subjects, then Updike is your man (and, I mean, man). I read many of these stories in high school for some reason and clearly did not understand them at all. Re-reading them some (cough cough) years later, I find that I perhaps understand them too well. I am impressed by their artfulness and the bravery of some of the rawer pieces (esp. from "Pigeon Feathers"); the exhaustion with consumerism feels as relevant today as it could have earlier. But, so many of the attitudes about marriage, women, white racial anxiety, and so on are so dated that the characterization suffers. It's harder to see Updike as the chronicler of the relatively liberal, cosmopolitan suburban middle-class anymore--no matter how many outposts still look and sound like this. These have become period pieces, kind of Jamesian in a way. They work stylistically and show his signature closing ironies off to particularly good effect, but I am not sure that these stories really speak to the present any more. They were contemporary, but now they are not.

[Elmwoodblues · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much is made of Updike being a very 'male' author, and not unjustifiably. He writes of a particular era, place in life, point of view. But, isn't that 'fiction'? One need not be a whaler to read Melville, a matador to read Hemingway.

There are many stories here, little snapshots of daily life; like life, not everything seems memorable as it is happening. Today might just be a moment at the A & P, a walk in the city, or dislodging a car from a snowy driveway. Yet, these are the things a life is made up of, places to glimpse the magic in the everyday. Updike is an unparalleled reporter of the big little things.

[LordOfDorkness · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a huge collection of stories by a very talented writer. They are all dense and difficult reads. On a sentence to sentence basis, Updike is so precise and detailed with whatever he's talking about that I found myself having trouble processing what I was reading. I felt overloaded, but still interested. I think I liked them because I like figuring things out.

-B

[Eric Byrd]

With the exception of the high school-assigned, half-forgotten 'A&P' and 'Pigeon Feathers,' the stories are in my readerly blind spot.

[Chris Solem · Rating 5 out of 5]

No doubt greatest American short-story writer ever. I have never read prose so poetically written.

[AC]

Spent the day reading this — and they just don’t work for me — even his widely anthologized “A & P”. I’ll try the Rabbit books one day, if chance arises.

[Aron · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my second foray into Updike. My introduction was Couples, which I didn't care for. Completing this massive volume of short stories was a much cozier, engaging endeavor, which stretched out over 6 months. Updike's prose has a weight to it; the pages don't fly by, and by the nature of the short story I could dip into just a few pages each night.

Not that a good portion of these stories weren't similarly obsessed with extra-marital affairs (they were) but here they are presented within a broader, richer context that includes childhood, adolescence, faith, mortality, satire, and the absurd. The connective tissue here is a subtle melancholy that hovers over the characters, and of course Updike's ridiculously prodigious and unique writing style. The sentences are crafted like music, such as: "All the warm night the secret snow fell so adhesively that every twig in the woods about their little rented house supported a tall slice of white, an upward projection which in the shadowless glow of early morning lifted depth from the scene, made it seem Chinese, calligraphic, a stiff tapestry hung from the gray sky, a shield of ice interwoven with black thread."

The language can be equally cutting and devastating, though. Here are extracts from two different stories about a dying parent:
"Though at the time I was impatient to have his consent to leave, it has since occurred to me that during that instant when his face was blank he was swallowing the realization that he could die and my life would go on."
"Her mother had died two years ago, leaving her daughters her china, her common sense, and a stately old man disintegrating from the head down."

My main reference for short stories are those classics by Hawthorne, Roald Dahl, O. Henry, James Thurber, etc. that always end with a twist, or at least a kicker at the end. I'm glad I read Cheever's stories before this, because it prepared me for a different style. Both Cheever and Updike are brave enough to write "slice of life" and then end a story without a real ending...but I found Updike to still be more satisfying, whereas with Cheever I was often left asking, "That's it?"

Bottom line, if you want the most artistic portrayal ever of human beings completely incapable of truly knowing themselves and others, look no further.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of over a hundred short works published in the New Yorker and other magazines.

Most all of these stories are good, some are super good, and some I found too self-reflexive, and I felt compelled to turn my head and cough as if getting a physical. Yes, awkward when you're reading a story so busy preening in the mirror it forgets the reader is in the room.

Updike writes in a voice that's similar (a distant relation) to the voice I find in Steven Millhauser's short stories. I kept wanting to pick up Millhauser and read it against Updike, but I resisted the urge, feeling, or perhaps fearing, the voices would lose something in the too near proximity of the other.

When Updike is on, his shadow can eclipse continents. And when I found myself in such a story, I let go, and fell, in love, and end over end with no regard for consequence.

I look forward to reading more Updike shortly.

In no particular order, these stories:
* Transaction
* The Family Meadow
* The Witnesses.
* You'll never know, dear
* Wife-Wooing
* The Morning
* During the Jurassic

[Dr G · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting collection. I am not usually a reader of short stories but I was happy to work through these, as they led me, more or less, through a nineteen fifties to nineteen seventies chronology and through lives from childhood to age and death.
The stories certainly reflect Updike and his world: they are the stories of a well-educated American male. For me, as a 1940s-born non-American male, they evoked strongly and vividly the world I remember very well from the culture that spread through the universe in those decades.
The writing is easy to read and fairly straight-forward without obvious "style". Some of the characters I found interesting to read about, some not.
Was America so obsessed with extra-marital affairs in those days?

[Dawn Meyers · Rating 3 out of 5]

I clicked the "Im finished " button on this, but I didnt actually finish the book. I decided I don't enjoy John Updike THAT MUCH. I got bored with this large book. Im sure he is a great writer, but this many stories was just too much for this reader.

[HansBlog · Rating 3 out of 5]

Geschichten von extrem unterschiedlicher Qualität. Meine ausführliche deutsche Besprechung steht hier:

https://hansblog.de/kritik-kurzgeschi...

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good taste of Updike's young work

[Greg Stratman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over 100 stories, over 800 pages. Well worth reading. Updike was a master of the short story.

[Bob Peru · Rating 4 out of 5]

the master of the art of the mundane.

[Michael Simile · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well worth the effort.

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of stories that depict "life’s incidents, predicaments, crises, joys."

Comprehensive read. Good read.