Olinger Stories [Hardcover]

The first one-volume hardcover edition of the eleven autobiographical stories that were closest to Updike's heart. With full-cloth binding and a silk ribbon marker. EVERYMAN'S POCKET CLASSICS.

In an interview, Updike once said, If I had to give anybody one book of me, it would be theOlinger Stories. These stories were originally published inThe New Yorkerand then in various collections before Vintage first put them together in one volume in 1964, as a paperback original. They follow the life of one character from the age of ten through manhood, in the small Pennsylvania town of Olinger (pronounced, according to Updike, with a long O and a hard G), which was loosely based on Updike's own hometown. All the stories draw from the same autobiographical well, Updike explained, the only child, the small town, the grandparental home, the move in adolescence to a farm. The selection was made and arranged by Updike himself, and was prefaced by a lovely 1,400-word essay by the author that has never been reprinted in full elsewhere until now.JOHN UPDIKE was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff ofThe New Yorker.His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.FOREWORD TO THE VINTAGE EDITION
 
Three of these stories are from my collection,The Same Door;seven are fromPigeon Feathers and Other Stories;and one, the last, has not previously been included in any book. All were first printed inThe New Yorker.They have been arranged here in the order of the hero’s age; in the beginning he is tel“W