“Phil, what do you know about John Updike?”
Blackwell stands up from his paper-laden desk and counts off titles, The Rabbit series, The Other Side of the Street, The Witches of Eastwick. He names the awards Updike garnered including multi-Pulitzers. I get a quick summation of his life and times; starting out in a small town in Pennsylvania, didn’t especially like the center of the literary world, New York City; then landed in Massachusetts, north of his alma mater Harvard.
What type of wordsmith was he? Well, not only was he a novelist, but an essayist, a writer of short stories, a poet, an art critic and he wrote about golf and baseball, too...
