Henry Bech is a fictional character created by American author John Updike. Bech first appeared in assorted short stories, stories which were later compiled in the books Bech: A Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1982), and Bech at Bay (1998). These books were all later collected in The Complete Henry Bech (2001), [1] which also included the short story His Oeuvre (2000).
Updike's Bech is considered an antihero, and Updike's alter-ego. While Updike generally concerns himself with WASP culture, is married, and is prolific, Bech is apathetically Jewish, a bachelor (later a husband and stepfather for a time, and finally a father in old age), and unprolific. In the introduction to his first collection, the eponymous author speculates he is modeled in part after many other famous writers, including Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger and Updike himself.
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
The O. Henry Award is an annual American award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American short-story writer O. Henry.
Thomas Douglas Jones was an American writer, primarily of short stories.
James Gould Cozzens was a Pulitzer prize-winning American writer whose work enjoyed an unusual degree of popular success and critical acclaim for more than three decades. His 1949 Pulitzer win was for the WWII race novel Guard of Honor, which more than one critic considered one of the most important accounts of the war. His 1957 Pulitzer nomination was for the best-selling novel By Love Possessed, which was later made into a popular 1961 film.
Merrymount Press was a printing press in Boston, Massachusetts, founded by Daniel Berkeley Updike in 1893. He was committed to creating books of superior quality and believed that books could be simply designed, yet beautiful. Upon his death in 1941, the Press was taken over by his partner John Bianchi, but ceased operations in 1949. Updike and his Merrymount Press left a lasting impression on the printing industry, and today Updike is considered one of the most distinguished printers of the twentieth century. Stanley Morison, the typographer responsible for creating the ubiquitous Times New Roman, had this to say of the Merrymount Press after Updike's passing: “The essential qualities of the work of the Merrymount Press...may be said without exaggeration…to have reached a higher degree of quality and consistency than that of any other printing-house of its size, and period of operation, in America or Europe.”
Andrew Sean Greer is an American novelist and short story writer. Greer received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Less. He is the author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an "inspired, lyrical novel", and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named one of the best books of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and received a California Book Award.
The Centaur is a novel by John Updike, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1963. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Portions of the novel first appeared in Esquire and The New Yorker.
The Best American Short Stories yearly anthology is a part of The Best American Series published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Since 1915, the BASS anthology has striven to contain the best short stories by some of the best-known writers in contemporary American literature.
Arnold Roth is an American cartoonist and illustrator for advertisements, album covers, books, magazines, and newspapers. Novelist John Updike wrote, "All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so."
A sketch story, literary sketch or simply sketch, is a piece of writing that is generally shorter than a short story, and contains very little, if any, plot. The genre was invented after the 16th century in England, as a result of increasing public interest in realistic depictions of "exotic" locales. The term was most popularly used in the late nineteenth century. As a literary work, it is also often referred to simply as "the sketch".
Couples is a 1968 novel by American author John Updike.
Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories is a collection of 19 works of short fiction by John Updike. The volume is Updike's first collection of short stories, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1962. It includes the stories "Wife-Wooing" and "A&P ", which have both been anthologized.
The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka is a compilation of all of Kafka's short stories. With the exception of three novels, this collection includes all of his narrative work. The book was originally edited by Nahum N. Glatzer and published by Schocken Books in 1971. It was reprinted in 1995 with an introduction by John Updike.
Fiction in the 1970s brought a return of old-fashioned storytelling, especially with Erich Segal's Love Story. The early seventies also saw the decline of previously well-respected writers, such as Saul Bellow and Peter De Vries, both of whom released poorly received novels at the start of the decade, but rebounded critically as the decade wore on. Racism remained a key literary subject. John Updike emerged as a major literary figure with his 1971 novel Rabbit Redux. Reflections of the 1960s experience also found roots in the literature of the decade through the works of Joyce Carol Oates and Wright Morris. With the rising cost of hardcover books and the increasing readership of "genre fiction", the paperback became a popular medium. Criminal non-fiction also became a popular topic. Irreverence and satire, typified in Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, were common literary elements. The horror genre also emerged, and by the late seventies Stephen King had become one of the most popular novelists in America, a coveted position he maintained in the following decade.
Plowville is an unincorporated area of Robeson Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania, United States. it is located on Pennsylvania Route 10, just east of Interstate 176. Its zip code is 19540 and the community is served by the Twin Valley School District. The most recognizable landmark is Plow Church.
The Same Door is a collection of 16 works of short fiction by John Updike published in 1959 by Alfred A. Knopf. The stories in the volume first appeared separately in The New Yorker, some in a slightly different form than in the collection. The Same Door is Updike's first volume of short stories.
Olinger Stories: A Selection is a collection of 11 works of short fiction by John Updike published by Vintage Books in 1964.
The Early Stories: 1953–1975, published in 2003 by Knopf, is a John Updike book collecting much of his short stories written from the beginning of his writing career, when he was just 21, until 1975. Only four stories published in this entire time period have been omitted from this collection by John Updike himself: "Intercession", and "The Pro", "One of My Generation", and "God Speaks". The majority of the stories were originally published in The New Yorker magazine. In 2004, the book received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Carol Sklenicka is an American biographer and literary scholar known for her authoritative, full-scale biographies of two important figures in late twentieth-century American literature: acclaimed short story masters Raymond Carver and Alice Adams.
David Updike is an American writer and academic. Updike is the son of author John Updike, who used him as a model for characters in several works of fiction, including Wife-wooing, Avec la Bebe-sitter, Son, and Separating.