The Last in a Line

One day in the fall of 1951, when he was a 19-year-old Harvard undergraduate, John Updike sat down to write a letter home. “Dear Family,” he wrote, “I received Mother’s letter today and was concerned to discover that I have not been handling my correspondence properly. Under the impression that I have been the most diligent of scribes, it startled me to be informed that the controversy had expanded beyond the family circle…and perhaps I had better tackle it.”