Through a journey of personal photographs and insight, David Updike, son of Pulitzer Prize winning author and Shillington native John Updike, spoke about his father’s childhood Oct. 2.
David Updike presented in a session on his family archaeology during the Third Biennial John Updike Society Conference at Alvernia University.
A slide show of photographs from John’s childhood accompanied Updike. Very few images of the inside of his father’s Shillington home exist, but the remnants of John Updike’s creativity survive. John Updike was born March 18, 1932 in Shillington, Pa.
Even as a child, Updike had a strong interest in drawing and writing.
“Is it possible to know within the first year of life a child’s destiny?” David posed this question after reading from his grandmother’s writings of raising John.
“He once described [his] need as a sickness, a compulsion to create,” David said. David is impressed by his father’s early creative impulses, always showing a need to create.
“Very early on he was aware of his authorship,” he said, standing before a projection screen showing a photograph of his father’s practice signatures from when he was a boy.
It was his mother’s attempts to become a published writer that impressed the young John Updike.
In summer of 1939 he began taking art classes and began making comic strips soon after.
“His mother must have been startled and had to understand that this is no ordinary child,” David said. “She kept his early works in a notebook.”
John Updike’s early years in Berks County would influence many of his early novels and short stories with references to the sights of Reading, the Pagoda and surrounding towns. Updike graduated from Shillington High School in 1950 and attended Harvard.
“He was strongly encouraged to pursue his artistic interest,” David said.
John began sending poems and drawings to the New Yorker. He became a regular contributor to The New Yorker, which began his professional writing career.
John went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes for both Rabbit Is Rich (1982) and Rabbit at Rest (1990). While David was growing up, his father kept to a strict writing schedule and aimed to produce three pages per day, a quota John easily met.
John died on Jan. 27, 2009 in Danvers, Massachusetts.
The John Updike Society is an organization devoted to awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike. The Society exists strictly in order to promote literature written by Updike and to foster and encourage critical responses. The Society publishes “The John Updike Review” annually and hosts a biennial conference at a site that was important in Updike’s life and works.
David Updike is an author himself and currently teaches at Roxbury Community College, Massachusetts.
Ryan Weber and Brian O’Shaughnessy are students at Alvernia College.
