When John Updike died in 2009, aged 76, he left behind the last great paper trail. Novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist and art critic, he published with unstoppable fluidity in every genre. The sheer tonnage of his 60-odd books has now been augmented by A Life in Letters, a comparatively small sampling of the 25,000 or so epistles he sent out over the course of his life. This unwieldy volume serves up about 700 of them. I say he wrote with unstoppable fluidity (it was David Foster Wallace who dangled the question ‘Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?’), but I should add that the letters and postcards (Updike loved a postcard) contain more than just pretty phrases. He talked shop – the writing, reading and manufacture of books – but also engaged in brave and sometimes anguished explorations of ambition, lust, love, guilt and shame.

‘Affairs are cruel, and if they are sin, they carry the punishment with them’

In his introduction, the editor James Schiff, a lifelong Updike scholar, whisks us past the landmark of a literary career. When Johnny was 11, an aunt gave him a subscription to the New Yorker. Two years later, he started sending submissions to magazines – the first glint of a keen literary ambition that never dulled. Aged 18, he escaped Nowheresville, Pennsylvania for college, choosing Harvard over Cornell (which offered him a more generous scholarship) because he rightly thought that the Harvard Lampoon, an undergraduate humour magazine, might launch him.

Launch him where? To his beloved New Yorker. He told its editor William Shawn that the magazine ‘formed the centre of my literary life and my life in general’. At 19, already hyper-attuned to the New Yorker vibe, he detected a new mid-century seriousness: ‘A magazine that once thumbed its nose seems to have shifted its hand and sadly scratches an ear.’ How........

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