Word: shillington
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...book opens in his hometown--Shillington, Pennsylvania--with Updike walking through the streets waiting for lost luggage and reminiscing. He introduces events and people from his childhood, cleverly returning to them throughout the work...
...more than 30 years, John Updike has borne, with considerable poise and good humor, a terrible burden. He is one of those people whose prayers were answered. Growing up a beloved only child in Shillington, a small town in southeastern Pennsylvania, he dreamed of becoming a writer, of seeing his work appear on the pages of The New Yorker. And -- presto! -- these things occurred and were then followed by unanticipated consequences: lots of money, critical recognition and fame. Worse fates have befallen people, and Updike adjusted as best he could: he cashed the checks, entertained intrusive interviewers and basked modestly...
...love came early, prompted by the sensations and surroundings of childhood. Visiting Shillington, Updike unexpectedly finds himself at loose ends for a couple of hours and wanders about through a soft spring drizzle, trying to recapture his past. He enters familiar ground: "The street, the house where I had lived, seemed blunt, modest in scale, simple; this deceptive simplicity composed their precious, mystical secret, the conviction of whose existence I had parlayed into a career, a message to sustain a writer book after book." His first attempts to put this secret into words were, he gently suggests, sometimes misunderstood...
...1960s, to oppose U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, a stance that left him odd man out among friends, fellow authors and members of his children's generation: "Authority to these young people was Amerika, a bloodstained bugaboo to be crushed at any cost. To me, authority was the Shillington High School faculty, my father and his kindly and friendly, rather wan and punctilious colleagues, with whose problems and perspective I had had every opportunity to empathize...
...stalled, though, just below the steep incline of road that rises through Updike's nine acres. It will arrive, some time soon, just as surely as scholars, journalists, graduate students and the idly curious have been tracking down Updike's past for years. They make pilgrimages to Shillington, Pa., where the author was born and spent his first 13 years. They then proceed to the old stone farmhouse outside town where he and his parents moved in 1945. They find his mother Linda, 78, still living there, cheerful, alert and willing to guide visitors through the landscape that...