Unlike his older contemporary Salinger, John Updike declared that he would prefer “to be a bad writer than not to write at all.” And since the 50s, he published more than 50 novels, collections of poems, stories, and essays. His columns on literature were published until recently in The New Yorker magazine. Updike, who spent most of his life as a writer, explained it by the need to keep in touch with the outside world - at least through literary correspondence.
