John Updike: The Collected Stories: A Library of America Boxed Set [Hardcover]

From his first collection,The Same Door, released in 1959, to his last,My Father’s Tears, published fifty years later, John Updike was America’s reigning master of the short story, “our second Hawthorne,” as Philip Roth described him. His evocations of small-town Pennsylvania life, and of his own religious, artistic, and sexual awakening, transfixed readers ofThe New Yorkerand of the early collectionsPigeon Feathers(1962) andThe Music School(1966). In these and the works that followed—the formal experiments and wickedly tart tales of suburban adultery inMuseums and Women(1972) andProblems(1979), the portraits of middle-aged couples in love and at war with aging parents and rebellious children inTrust Me(1987) andThe Afterlife(1994), and the fugue-like stories of memory, desire, travel, and unquenched thirst for life inLicks of Love(2000) andMy Father’s Tears(2009)—Updike displayed the virtuosic command of character, dialogue, and sensual description that was his signature.
 
Here, in two career-spanning volumes, are 186 unforgettable stories, from “Ace in the Hole” (1953), a sketch of a Rabbit-like ex-basketball player written when Updike was a Harvard senior, to “The Full Glass” (2008), the author’s “toast to the visible world, his own impending disappearance from it be damned.” Based on new archival research, each story is presented in its final definitive form and in order of composition, established here for the first time. This unprecedented collection of American masterpieces is not just the publishing event of the season, it is a national literary treasure.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most signil³Q