The Life and Writings of John Updike

Literary Research- The Life and Times John Updike was born on March 18, 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania. He was an only child of Wesely and Grace Updike. He was raised in nearby small town of Shillington. His father was a high school science teacher and his mother was an aspiring writer. In her fifties, some of her short stories were published in The New Yorker.

In 1950 John Updike graduated president and co-valedictorian from Shillington High School. During the summer he worked as a copy boy for the Reading Eagle. As a copy boy, he wrote a few feature stories for the newspaper ("Updike,John 414). That fall he began to attend Harvard and started writing for the Harvard Lampoon a funny magazine where he was later elected the president of the magazine. On June 26, 1953 he married his wife Mary E, Pennington a fine arts major from Radcliffe, she was two years older than John Updike.

In the fall he entered Harvard University on a tuition scholarship. He then began drawing and writing at the same time for a humorous magazine called the Harvard Lampoon. He was eventually elected president of the magazine. Shortly after this he received his major in English Literature. While enrolled in Harvard he met Mary E. Pennington, a fine arts major from Radcliffe, and on June 26, 1953 they decided to get married.

Frost stayed at Dartmouth for less than a term, then left (5). This caused a fit with Elinor, she wanted him to finish college and wouldn’t marry him until he graduated college. Frost went back to Massachusetts to teach and to work at a variety of jobs like delivering newspapers and factory labor. He hated these jobs with a passion, finally feeling his true calling as a poet (4). The poet favored Ralph Waldo Emerson, and read many of his works (6).

Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of the elderly couple. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged. Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS.

Frost was then sent to Dartmouth college by his controlling grandfather, who saw it as the proper place for him to train to become a businessman. Frost read even more in college, and learned that he loved poetry. His poetry had little success getting published, and he had to work various jobs to make a living, such as a shoemaker, a country schoolteacher, and a farmer. In 1912 Frost gave up his teaching job, sold his farm, and moved to England. He received aid from poets suck as Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke, and published his first two volumes of poetry, A Boy's Will in 1913, and North of Boston in 1914.

She began turning out short stories in elementary school after her mother gave her an old '30s typewriter, and she wrote her first unpublished novel by the time she graduated from Holy Cross High School in Mountain View." She taught English at several California high schools and has conducted creative writing courses at Coastline College (Costa Mesa, CA), Irvine Valley College (Irvine, CA), and the University of California, Irvine. She was selected Teacher of the Year by the Orange County Department of Education in 1981. Contemporary Authors quotes Ms. George, "I'm often asked why I write about England. The answer lies in my philosophy: 'Write about what interests you; write about what you love; write about what gives you joy.'

Robert Frost’s Life as a Poet Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco, California on March 26 of 1974 and died in Boston, Massachusetts on January 29 of 1963. Though he did not truly start publishing poems until age thirty-nine, Frost obtained four Pulitzer prizes in his writing career and was deemed one of the greatest twentieth century poets. His pastoral writing and skilled use of meter and rhythm has captured the attention of reader’s and critics for decades (Academic American, 345). Frost was very fond of nature and the beauty of things around him and illustrated this in many of his poems. A reviewer stated that Frost was “always occupied with the complicated task of simply being sincere” (Faggen, I).

Meanwhile, Emerson began keeping a list of books he had read and started a journal in a series of notebooks that would be called ‘World Wide’. Emerson performed odd jobs to cover his school expenses, including as a waiter for the Junior Commons and occasionally working as a teacher with his uncle Samuel in Waltham, Massachusetts. He began his famous Journal, an anthology and patchwork of passages that surprised and astonished his readers with their comments, ended up reaching 182 volumes. In his senior year at Harvard, Emerson decided to take his middle name as Waldo. He attended class Poetry; as usual, and presented an original poem on Harvard's Class Day, a month before his official graduation.

In the fall of '71 King was hired as a teacher at Hampden Academy, a public high school in Hampden, Maine. He still found time to write short stories and work on his novel on the weekends and evenings. King's first big break came on the spring of 1973 upon the acceptence of Doubleday & Co. to publish Stephen King's novel Carrie. After learning from his new editor, Bill Thompson, that a major paperback sale would make him financially secure enough to quit teaching, Stephen moved his now growing family to southern Maine because of his grandmother's ever growing sickness. During the writing of Salem's Lot