A very well-written op-ed on John Updike and the number of authors we have recently lost.
IT has been a hard year or so for writers. The world seems to grow emptier and emptier, depletion without replenishment, and now with the passing of John Updike at the age of 76, death has taken perhaps its biggest prize.
Literature, of course, is not a contest. Still, that Stockholm did not ultimately embrace Mr. Updike — a Nobel, why not? — seems too bad, as it probably would have meant a lot to him, and to us as well to have his erudition and hard work and enthusiastic witnessing of postwar America honored on such a stage. The news that he died in a hospice not far from his house, and the new ordinariness of this current manner of death, made me wonder what he would have noticed and written about it —“I’m sure it will be discovered he was taking notes,” a friend said, hopefully — for he was gifted at describing everything.
Read more about John Updike and his poem Requiem.
You can also read my book review regarding his recent novel The Terrorist.
the loss of John Updike makes me wonder if the literary world is being replenished at the same rate that it’s losing such great writers