Word: shillington
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...want of trying. The whole corpus of Updike's fiction before Couples amounts to a memoir of his boyhood. His mother has called those writings "valentines" to the friends and family back home in the small (pop. 5,639) Pennsylvania Dutch farm town of Shillington, three miles from Reading, where John was born. His mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, is a cosmopolitan, well-educated writer herself (four stories in The New Yorker since John blazed the way), and she has always loathed everything about Shillington. She admits now to having broken up a high-school romance of John...
...teens, Updike threw himself into the life at Shillington High School with a kind of desperado love, writing like a fiend, drawing like a dervish, wooing his classmates with methods that have remained standard to this day Whenever he felt neglected or unappreciated, he took a pratfall. "I developed the technique," he explains, "as a way of somehow exorcising theevil spirits and winning approval and defying
...Updikes moved to Ipswich in 1957, John found himself more than ever in thrall to his homeward-looking vision. So many short stories flowed from his reservoir of nostalgia that he collected eleven of the best in a volume called Olinger Stories-Olinger being "audibly a shadow of Shillington," Updike wrote, and yet something other. "The surrounding land is loamy, and Olinger is haunted-hexed, perhaps-by rural memories, accents and superstitions. It is beyond the western edge of Megalopolis, and hangs between its shallow hills enchanted, nowhere, anywhere; there is no place like it. Olinger is a state...
Updike's novels, though very much distinct from each other, were each rooted in the past. The Poorhouse Fair, though ostensibly set in New Jersey, was really drawn from the old folks' home near the Updike house in Shillington, and told a slight, whispered story of the accumulating sense of pointlessness among the inmates. From there, Updike leaped two generations to Rabbit, Run, a quietly savage novel about a former high school basketball star who simply runs away from wife, child, job and the suffocating box of senseless moral obligations. It was a flawlessly turned portrait...
...find out that Mr. Updike was born in Shillington, Pa., where he received his secondary education, and that after Harvard he studied art in England on a Knox fellowship. We learned that he is married (to a Radcliffe alumnae) and has four children. But then it really was noon, and we scurried off to catch up on modern novels...