JOHN UPDIKE was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. 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; since 1957 he has lived in Massachusetts. He is the author of twenty-one novels as well as numerous collections of short stories, poems and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award and the Howells Medal.
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First published 1968
Published in Penguin Books 2007
Copyright © John Updike, 1974
Paul Tillich’s The Future of Religions was published by Harper & Row, New York
The lines from Alexander Blok’s ‘The Scythians’ are from An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet period from Gorki to Pasternak, edited and translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, published by Vintage Books, New York
The lines from Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams are copyright MCMXXXI Shapiro, Bernstein and Co., Inc. New York, Copyright renewed MCMLVIII. Used by permission.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-90609-6
There is a tendency in the average citizen, even if he has a high standing in his profession, to consider the decisions relating to the life of the society to which he belongs as a matter of fate on which he has no influence—like the Roman subjects all over the world in the period of the Roman empire, a mood favorable for the resurgence of religion but unfavorable for the preservation of a living democracy.
—Paul Tillich,
The Future of Religions
We love the flesh: its taste, its tones,
Its charnel odor, breathed through Death’s jaws …
Are we to blame if your fragile bones
Should crack beneath our heavy, gentle paws?
—Alexander Blok,
“The Scythians”
i. Welcome to Tarbox
ii. Applesmiths and Other Games
iii. Thin Ice
iv. Breakthrough
v. It’s Spring Again
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