The short stories, set in the fictional town of Olinger, Pennsylvania are in large part autobiographical, about a boy growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, and his experiences as he reaches adolescence and manhood. As presented in Olinger Stories: A Selection the stories match the fictional chronology “which follow a single narrator through his adolescence, marriage, and divorce.”[2][3]
All of the selections in this volume originally appeared in The New Yorker. Three of the works were previously collected in The Same Door (1959), and seven had been published in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962). “In Football Season” had not been previously collected.[4]
“You'll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You” (June 10, 1960)
“The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island” (January 6, 1962)
“Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, Dying Cat, Traded Car (December 16, 1961)
“In Football Season” (November 10, 1962)
Critical Assessment
“The point, to me, is plain, and is the point, more or less, of these Olinger Stories. We are rewarded unexpectedly. The muddled and inconsequent surface of things now and then parts to yield us a gift.”—John Updike in the Foreword to Olinger Stories (1964)[5][6]
Literary critic Jane Barnes offers this appraisal of Updike’s autobiographical works in the collection:
The best Olinger stories provide us with a model of what Updike’s recent stories have returned to. In “Flight,” “ Pigeon Feathers,” “A Sense of Shelter,” there is more fancy writing than there is in To Far to Go: Maples Stories (1979) or Problems and Other Stories (1979), but in both groups of stories the writing all serves a purpose. In the long run, the unruly impulses in his style seem to have been brought under control by the same principle that liberates the narrator from the past.[7]
Updike is a romantic; for him the instinctive, unselfconscious sense of ‘what feels right’ is the source of life and the means of salvation…[his] inclination to write almost exclusively about the life of a young man from the small Pennsylvania town he calls Olinger that seems very like the Shillington, Pennsylvania, that John Updike remembers from his own boyhood. Like all American romantics he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself.[8]
In assembling the short stories and sketches called, simply, Olinger Stories, Updike spoke of having said the "final word" in 1964; by having written The Centaur and transforming Olinger into Olympus, he closed the book on his own adolescence—the past is now a fable, receding, completed. But the past is never completed; it is not even past. It is a continual present.[9]
Updike on Olinger Stories
“Composition, in crystallizing memory, displaces it.”—Updike in the Foreword to Olinger Stories (1964)[10][11]
In the Vintage edition foreword, Updike explains, "Three of these stories are from my collection, The Same Door; seven are from Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories; and one, the last, has not previously been included in any book. All were first printed in The New Yorker. They have been arranged here in the order of the hero's age; in the beginning he is ten, in the middle stories he is an adolescent, in the end he has reached manhood. He wears different names and his circumstances vary, but he is at bottom the same boy, a local boy—this selection could be called A Local Boy. The locality is that of Olinger, Pennsylvania, a small town bounded on the urban side by Alton and on the rural side by Firetown. The name Olinger (pronounced with a long O, a hard g, and the emphasis on the first syllable) was coined, to cap a rebuke, in a story called 'The Alligators'. . . Fiction must recommend itself or remain unrecommended. But if of my stories I had to pick a few to represent me, they would, I suppose, for reasons only partially personal, be these."[12]
↑ Pritchard, 2000 p. 65: The Olinger Stories “arranges the stories according to the age of Updike’s protagonist - high school boy, young married man visiting his parents after spending a year in England, older father of four returning, in fact of imagination to the Pennsylvania farm.”
Carduff, Christopher. 2013. Ref. 1 Note on the Texts in John Updike: Collected Early Stories. Christopher Carduff, editor. The Library of America. pp. 910-924 ISBN978-1-59853-251-7
Hunt, George W. 1972. Reality, Imagination, and Art: The Significance of John Updike’s “Best” Story in Critical Essays on John Updike. G. K. Hall & Co. (1982), William R. Macnaughton editor. pp.71-75. ISBN0-8186-8467-4
Mizener, Arthur. 1964. Memory in Pigeon Feathers excerpted from “The American Hero as High-School Boy: Peter Caldwell” in John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays. 1979. David Thorburn and Howard Eiland editors. pp.178-182. ISBN0-13-937607-0
Oates, Joyce Carol. 1975. Updike’s American Comedies from Modern Fiction Studies 21, Fall 1975, Purdue Research Foundation, in John Updike: Modern Critical Views, Harold Bloom, editor. pp. 57-68 ISBN0-87754-717-3
Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow? is a work of short fiction by the novelist John Updike, first appearing in The New Yorker on March 30, 1956. It was published in his 1959 collection The Same Door.
“A Trillion Feet of Gas” is a work of short fiction by John Updike first appearing in The New Yorker on December 8, 1956. The story was collected The Same Door (1959), published by Alfred A. Knopf.
“A&P” is a tragicomic work of short fiction by John Updike which first appeared in The New Yorker on July 22, 1961. The story was collected in Pigeon Feathers in 1961, published by Alfred A. Knopf. The work is frequently included in anthologies.
To Far to Go: the Maples Stories is a collection of 12 works of short fiction by John Updike. The stories first appeared in The New Yorker and were included in the volume published by Fawcett Publications in 1979
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 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.
“Snowing in Greenwich Village” is a work of short fiction by John Updike, first published in The New Yorker on January 13, 1956. The story was collected in The Same Door (1959) published by Alfred A. Knopf.
“Pigeon Feathers” is a work of short fiction by John Updike which first appeared in The New Yorker on April 27, 1956. The story was collected in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962) by Alfred A. Knopf.
“Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car” is a work of short fiction by John Updike, first appearing in The New Yorker on December 16, 1961. The story was collected in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962) by Alfred A. Knopf.
Problems and Other Stories is a collection of 23 works of short fiction by John Updike. The volume was published in 1979 by Alfred A. Knopf. The stories were first carried in literary journals, 17 of which appeared in The New Yorker. Problems and Other Stories is one of two collections of Updike's short stories that appeared in 1979.
The Music School: Short Stories is a collection of 20 works of short fiction by John Updike, first appearing individually in The New Yorker. The stories were collected in this volume by Alfred A. Knopf in 1966.
Museums and Women and Other Stories is a collection of 25 works of short fiction by John Updike, first appearing individually in literary journals. The stories were collected by Alfred A. Knopf in 1972.
“The Music School” is a work of short fiction by John Updike that first appeared in The New Yorker on December 12, 1964. The story was collected in the volume of Updike's fiction The Music School: Short Stories (1966), published by Alfred A. Knopf.
“The Happiest I’ve Been” is a work of short fiction by John Updike, first appearing in The New Yorker on January 3, 1959. The story was collected in The Same Door (1959) published by Alfred A. Knopf.
“Giving Blood” is a work of short fiction by John Updike first appearing in The New Yorker on March 29, 1963. The story was collected in Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories (1979), published by Fawcett Publications.
“Wife-Wooing” is a work of short fiction by John Updike which first appeared in The New Yorker on March 12, 1960. The story was collected in Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories (1979), published by Fawcett Publications.
“Problems” is a work of short fiction by John Updike first appearing in The New Yorker on November 3, 1975. The story was collected in Problems and Other Stories (1979) published by Alfred A. Knopf.
“The Egg Race” is a work of short fiction by John Updike which first appeared in The New Yorker on June 13, 1977. The story was collected in Problems and Other Stories (1979) by Alfred A. Knopf.
“Ace in the Hole" is a work of short fiction by John Updike that first appeared in The New Yorker on April 9, 1955. The story was collected in the volume of Updike's fiction The Same Door (1959), published by Alfred A. Knopf.
The Afterlife and Other Stories is a collection of 22 works of short fiction and a novella by John Updike. The volume was published in 1994 by Alfred A. Knopf.
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