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The Complete Henry Bech
  • Published: 15 October 2006
  • ISBN: 9781857152647
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 552
  • RRP: $45.00

The Complete Henry Bech

Formats & editions
EBook
1 June 2006
Paperback
17 July 2006
Hardback
15 Oct 2006
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The Bech stories-collected in one volume for the first time, and featuring a final, series-capping story, "His Oeuvre"-cast an affectionate eye on the famously unproductive Jewish-American writer, offering up a stream of wit, whimsy, and lyric pungency unmatched in American letters.
"One of Updike's best creations." -Life

From his birth in 1923 to his belated paternity and public apotheosis as a spry septuagenarian in 1999, Bech plugs away, globetrotting in the company of foreign dignitaries one day and schlepping in tattered tweeds on the college lecture circuit the next. By turns cynical and naïve, wry and avuncular, and always amorous, he is Updike's most endearing confection-a Lothario, a curmudgeon, and a winsome literary icon all in one. A perfect forum for Updike's limber prose, The Complete Henry Bech is an arch portrait of the literary life in America from an incomparable American writer.

Since tales of his exploits began appearing in The New Yorker more than thirty years ago, Henry Bech, John Updike's playfully irreverent alter-ego, has charmed readers with his aesthetic dithering and his seemingly inexhaustible libido.
  • Published: 15 October 2006
  • ISBN: 9781857152647
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 552
  • RRP: $45.00
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About the author

John Updike

John Updike was born in 1932, in hillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

JU

Also by John Updike

The Witches of Eastwick
Rabbit, Run: Popular Penguins
Terrorist
A Life in Letters
Selected Poems
Foreword
John Updike: Novels 1996–2000 (LOA #365)
See all

Praise for The Complete Henry Bech

A deft poke at what it means to be a writer in America.

New York Times

In his extraordinarily productive career, John Updike has given us a multitude of memorable characters, but none more lovable than the high-minded, mild-mannered, rather hapless writer Henry Bech.

Chicago Tribune

As imaginative territory, literary Manhattan has proved irresistible to Updike the satirist, and he has done it full justice and then some in his volumes of stories concerning the doings of New York novelist Henry Bech.

The New Criterion

A mordantly comic look at literary life.

Time