![]() Last week the Ink Spill: New Yorker Cartoonists News and Events blog featured Updike’s Thurber cartoon, courtesy of Miranda Updike this week, the blog adds a letter that Updike had written home to his parents and other “Plowvillians,” provided by Michael Updike. Updike had written a fan letter to the famed cartoonist asking for a drawing to hang on his bare wall, and Thurber obliged. that is, James Thurber’s drawing of a dog made especially for young Updike, whose first ambition was to become a cartoonist. ![]() Pets weren’t allowed in the dorm when John Updike went to Harvard in the fall of 1950, but he took his dog anyway. ‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu’ is regarded as a classic. Is this reportage or an essay? Updike tried to do both. ![]() One tires of Updike’s verbal pyrotechnics, his asides (authorial interventions, commentary). It is the work of a brilliant, undeniably talented writer whose dazzling performance-like that of some virtuosos-comes between you and the subject matter, i.e., the focus of the piece: the great baseball player Ted Williams, his last game. It is too fine (typical of New Yorker pieces) too ‘literary and (at times) too flowery. “What is wrong-in my ‘contrarian’ opinion-with Updike’s piece? The Bosox slugger hit a home run in his very last career at-bat, and Updike was in the stands to memorialize the moment with what became one of his most famous pieces of prose.īut blogger Roger W. Hall of Fame sportswriters have said as much, though the essay’s monumental status was no doubt helped by Ted Williams. John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” is widely regarded by sportswriters and sports fans everywhere to be the best piece of sports writing ever done by anyone. One was style: ‘His writing is so visual, at the level of image and metaphor, it’s almost redundant to put it into a visual medium.’ In addition, ‘The “American small town, Protestant middle class” as he described his milieu, has not been of very big interest, personally or cinematically, to the Hollywood establishment.’ ( The Witches of Eastwick with its supernatural element was thought more accessible for audiences.) Nor has Updike had a film-industry champion eager to put his work onscreen the way some other writers of his era have, Timberg wrote. “Shortly after Updike died in 2009 at the age of 76, Scott Timberg pondered Updike’s ‘dozens of novels and several hundred short stories’ for and saw several reasons why Updike did not make it to the movies much. There’s a 1970 movie of his novel Rabbit, Run, with James Caan, TV-movie Too Far to Go (1979) from Updike short stories, movies and TV productions inspired by the novel The Witches of Eastwick and a few shorter productions. There have been a few adaptations of the works of Updike, one of the most admired American writers. Heldenfels replied, “I do not know of any plans. The Hastings Tribune‘s Rich Heldenfels (Tribune News Service, Nebraska) was asked by a reader, “Do you know of any plans to make (remake) a film based on any John Updike novels?”
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