Description
Book SynopsisTaps archival materials and unread works from John Updike’s college years to offer a clearer view of his acute political thought and ideas. Updike's prescient literary imagination, Fromer shows, sensed the disappointments and alienation of rural white working- and middle-class Americans decades before conservatives sought to exploit them.
Trade ReviewJohn Updike has long been acknowledged as one of the great American novelists of the twentieth century, even while his political insights have consistently been underappreciated. Yoav Frome's
The Moderate Imagination delivers an important new understanding of Updike's political instincts and vision. This fuller and more rounded picture of Updike's literary intentions and his social and political insights will benefit even the experts." - Cal Jillson, author of
The American Dream: In History, Politics, and Fiction"John Updike has long been regarded as one of America's great writers, but one whose domain was largely American domesticity. Fromer's book builds a compelling case for Updike also being one of America's great
prescient writers - one who anticipated the current political state of events more than fifty years ago. 'More than anything,' Fromer writes, 'Updike's writings help illustrate the fundamental inability of more and more Americans to grasp, let alone cope with, profound transformations they could neither understand nor control.' This is a smart book that reads at times like the academic equivalent of a 'real page-turner." - James Plath, author of
Conversations with John Updike and
John Updike's Pennsylvania Interviews and R. Forrest Colwell Endowed Chair & Professor of English, Illinois Wesleyan University
