About the Author

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.

Reviews

“Quintessential Updike . . . [a] comic and melancholy reflection on politics and passion.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Updike has the ability to evoke the micro-epochs that fascinate us. He can bring to life what seem to those of us who have lived them the vital differences between the decades of our lives.”—Chicago Tribune
 
“Compelling . . . Alf’s life and times are light and funny; Buchanan’s are dark and serious. Alternating between the two, Mr. Updike entertains and instructs . . . in gorgeous prose.”—The Wall Street Journal

A simple request from an organization of historians for impressions of the Ford administration elicits these ``memories'' as reponse. Professor Alfred Clayton remembers what the Ford years meant for him: domestic disruption in the wake of his leaving his wife, the Queen of Disorder, for his idealized mistress, the Perfect Wife; ubiquitous sexual license; and the eventual abandonment of his attempt to write a sympathetic biography of President James Buchanan. But the subject of this virtuoso performance is not so much life during the Ford years as it is human memory and how lives, both our own and those of the historical dead, are remembered. Updike writes with droll wit and sly observation, serving up a meditation on history hidden in an erotic comedy. This should stand in the Updike oeuvre where Pale Fire does in that of Nabokov.-- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.

"Quintessential Updike . . . [a] comic and melancholy reflection on politics and passion."-The New York Times Book Review

"Updike has the ability to evoke the micro-epochs that fascinate us. He can bring to life what seem to those of us who have lived them the vital differences between the decades of our lives."-Chicago Tribune

"Compelling . . . Alf's life and times are light and funny; Buchanan's are dark and serious. Alternating between the two, Mr. Updike entertains and instructs . . . in gorgeous prose."-The Wall Street Journal