Pieces of literary history: Updike family donates items to Beverly Farms library

Apr. 14—BEVERLY — As a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, John Updike was a prominent figure in American literature. As a longtime resident of Beverly, he kept a lower profile.

"He was very unassuming," said Dorothea Lam, the head librarian of the Beverly Farms Library. "Whenever he came in here he sort of melted in the background."

Updike's low-key connection to Beverly got a bit of a boost on Tuesday when the late author's son Michael stopped by the Beverly Farms Library to donate several items that belonged to his famous father.

The items included Updike's 2006 Nashville Public Library Literacy Award, a framed Updike quote, three personal letters, a postcard, and a business card that Updike had made when he graduated from high school.

Michael Updike, a sculptor who lives in Newbury, said the idea for the donations came about last year when he and his wife, Olga Karasik-Updike, decided to visit the Farms library, which is a branch of the Beverly Public Library. John Updike's name is featured on the Farms library building alongside those of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had a summer home in Beverly, and poet Lucy Larcom, who was born in Beverly.

"I said, 'Let's go see the library with my father's name on it,'" Michael Updike said.

During the visit then-librarian Martha Morgan mentioned to him that people would sometimes come into the library and ask if it owned any Updike-related items. The library has about two dozen Updike books, many of them signed by the author, in a downstairs research room, and of course Updike books that can be checked out. But otherwise there was nothing to highlight the fact that Updike lived the last three decades of his life a half-mile away on Hale Street.

Michael Updike said he and his siblings — sisters Elizabeth Cobblah and Miranda Updike and brother David Updike — picked out the items to donate.

"My father strongly believed in local libraries and research," Michael Updike said. "He did not use the internet for research."

John Updike moved to Beverly in 1982 and lived at 675 Hale St. with his second wife, Martha. According to "Updike," a biography by Adam Begley, Updike wrote 13 novels, 100 stories, more than 250 poems and about 300 reviews in the 27 years he lived in Beverly. He died in 2009 at the age of 76.

Michael Updike said his father lived "sort of in isolation" in Beverly — his house was on a private road of Hale Street — and did not "rub shoulders with the locals" as much as he did when he lived in Ipswich in his earlier years. But he did like to visit the Farms library and the nearby book shop.

"He really liked Beverly Farms," Michael said.

The letters donated to the library give a glimpse of the personal side of Updike. In a typewritten 2001 letter to Michael and his family, Updike thanks them for a recent Christmas visit.

"(I)t gladdened our heart to see the two boys, so handsome in their different styles, growing in grace and wit. I hope they have learned to play with their presents; the Pokemon Monopoly might have to wait a year or two." Updike signed it, "Dad/John/Grandpa."

In another letter, from 1968, Updike wrote to friends in Ipswich from London, where he was living at the time.

"We spend our days dodging rainclouds, taking erroneous buses, walking till our ankles swell up like adders, and learning to understand our house and our neighborhood," he wrote.

Michael Updike said John started writing letters at age 8 (when he wrote to his father, who was having a hernia operation) until 10 days before he died. And he saved most of them. A volume of his letters is scheduled to be published next year, Michael Updike said.

Staff writer Paul Leighton can be reached at 978-338-2535, by email at pleighton@salemnews.com, or on Twitter at @heardinbeverly.