John Updike, 1955
Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images, via NYMag
The 'net is fairly bursting with Updike appreciations, but I especially like this one from Sam Anderson at New York, which notes that amid what can seem an intimidating body of work, Updike's essays offer an easy and richly satisfying introduction or revisit.
I always go back, first, to his essays, which strike me as the purest expression of his personality: easy, sociable, curious, smart, funny, generous, and almost pathologically cheerful. He was, for my money, one of the greatest belletrists of all time -- a master of the…
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