The Early Stories: 1953–1975

The Early Stories: 1953–1975 gathers 103 of John Updike's stories, almost all the short fiction he wrote from 1953 to 1975, from his early twenties to his early forties; he left out only four. Knopf published it in October 2003 as a single volume of more than eight hundred pages, and most of the stories first appeared in The New Yorker. Updike did not arrange them in the order he wrote them. The book runs in eight sections: "Olinger Stories," "Out in the World," "Married Life," "Family Life," "The Two Iseults," "Tarbox Tales," "Far Out" and "The Single Life."

The Olinger stories return to a small Pennsylvania town modeled on Shillington, where Updike grew up. One of them, "Pigeon Feathers," follows David Kern, a boy of about fourteen whose family has moved from Olinger to the farm village of Firetown. Reading H. G. Wells's The Outline of History, which treats Jesus as a purely historical figure, throws him into a crisis of faith, and it resolves only when he shoots pigeons in his grandmother's barn with a.22 and, studying their feathers, becomes certain that "the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy his whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever." In "A&P" a nineteen year old checkout clerk named Sammy watches three girls in bathing suits shop, sees the manager, Lengel, tell them to cover up next time, and quits on the spot in protest; outside, the girls are gone, and he feels "how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter." The stories of Richard and Joan Maple trace a marriage coming apart, and in "Marching Through Boston" a civil rights march becomes one more front in the Maples' quarrel.

This is a book to live with rather than read through. Updike's sentences are dense with simile and physical detail, and John Keenan, reviewing it for January Magazine, wrote that "the reader willingly submits to the luxuriant style, the overflow of simile and metaphor." Readers who want plot will find the suburban adulteries of the later sections repetitive at length. Taken a few at a time, the stories give a close record of American middle class life across two decades, told by a writer watching himself grow up and grow older.