LITERARY CONSPIRACY THEORY: THE UPDIKE BOOK ON THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY BEING HELD UP FOR 20 YEARS?
The 1,635 books in the Updike archive are already available to scholars. Manuscripts will be ready as early as August, and correspondence will be open to researchers by the end of the year. The novel on which he was working at the time of his death, which involved St. Paul and early Christianity, will not be available until 2029. From The Harvard Gazette, Updikes roots and evolution
The non-scientists relation to modern science is basically craven: we look to its discoveries and technology to save us from disease, to give us a faster ride and a softer life, and at the same time we shrink from what it has to tell us of our perilous and insignificant place in the cosmos. Not that threats to our safety and significance were absent from the pre-scientific world, or that arguments against a God-bestowed human grandeur were lacking before Darwin. But our centurys revelations of unthinkable largeness and unimaginable smallness, of abysmal stretches of geological time when we were nothing, of supernumerary galaxies and indeterminate subatomic behavior, of a kind of mad mathematical violence at the heart of matter have scorched us deeper than we know. -John Updike
Farewell to John Updike, a man of wry and reserved delicacy – Slate by Christopher Hitchens
