Best Moments from the Updike Tribute

Roger Angell, Updike’s fiction editor at the New Yorker, on his famous 1960 piece “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”

“‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu’ might have set the tone for my own baseball stuff, which had not yet begun or even been thought of, and perhaps encouraged the New Yorker to publish a few more sports pieces than it had so far. Thank you, John.”

Chip McGrath, former editor of the New York Times Book Review and a former editor at the New Yorker, on Updike’s golf writing

“He wrote better than anyone ever has about what it feels like to play this confounding game—so frustrating and rewarding both.”

“The Updike swing, it has to be said, was not quite as beautiful as the Updike sentence, though in some ways, it was just as thoughtful and considered… What he most liked about golf was that it took him out of his self, and temporarily gave him another one.”

Adam Gopnik, a colleague and friend of Updike’s at the New Yorker

“Humor had always been, and always would remain, his default mode.”

“I once had the opportunity to walk through the Museum of Modern Art with Updike, and I always had the feeling—which he did not deny, but did not affirm—that there was something about the practice of visual art making that spoke to his own condition as a writer more deeply than, perhaps, even a writer did.”

ZZ Packer, novelist and short-story writer, on meeting him on the set of the Today show

“John Updike got made up and came into the green room, and his face was entirely smeared with this peach kind of pancake makeup. And I thought, should I tell John Updike, the most amazing living writer, that he looks like an autumn squash? And I decided not to do that. I simply introduced myself and said: ‘I’m ZZ.’ And he shook my hand and said: ‘I’m orange.’”

Lorrie Moore, author of several short-story collections, including Birds of America

“I have never worked with John Updike, except twice, and that was when we got ourselves to put forward for inclusion in the American Academy of Arts and Letters two people we thought had been overlooked. And he did this with the righteousness of someone correcting an injustice, but also with the glee of someone who was sneaking rum into a convent.”

David Updike, John Updike’s son and a teacher of English at Roxbury Community College in Boston, on Updike at the end of his life

“Through his unkind illness, he remained, in his wife’s words, ‘dignified and noble.’ He continued to be what his own father had called a gentleman. And he continued to shave, each day, my sisters noted, even when it was perilous to do so. And as he so often did, he left for us a glimmer, a gift of himself, heart and mind conjoined.”

“Among the last books he was reading was Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama. He read it in bed, in a sunny room, overlooking the ocean, and I believe, for him, it was especially poignant, trying to catch up on history he was about to miss, a ship that was about to leave the port without him.”