Updike’s life in letters
Arts & Culture
Updike’s life in letters
Author John Updike at his home in Massachusetts in November 1978.
Photo by Jack Mitchell/Getty Images
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
January 21, 2026 5 min readFrom teen penning fan mail on family farm to Pulitzer Prize-winning author: ‘He needed to write the way most of us need to breathe or eat’
It started with a letter.