The Early Stories: 1953-1975 was published by Alfred A. Knopf in October 2003 and collects 103 stories from the first half of Updike’s career — drawing from The Same Door (1959), Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Music School (1966), Museums and Women (1972), and uncollected pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere. At 838 pages, it is one of the great single-volume story collections in American literature, rivaling the collected stories of Cheever and Chekhov in scope and sustained quality.
The Stories
The collection presents Updike at the height of his lyric powers — before the later novels became looser and more discursive, when every sentence was polished to a high gloss and every story was a formally complete work of art:
“A&P” — the most anthologized American short story of the postwar era: a nineteen-year-old supermarket clerk quits his job to defend three girls in bathing suits, and discovers that grand gestures have consequences.
“Pigeon Feathers” — a boy kills pigeons in a barn and finds in the beauty of their feathers a refutation of the atheism that has been terrifying him. One of the great stories about religious doubt.
“Separating” — Richard and Joan Maple tell their children about their impending divorce. The story’s final line is devastating.
“The Bulgarian Poetess” — Henry Bech’s encounter with a woman writer in Sofia; the impossibility of genuine connection across political and linguistic barriers.
“The Christian Roommates” — two Harvard freshmen whose incompatibility becomes a study in American types.
“Wife-Wooing” — a husband’s attempt to seduce his own wife, rendered in prose of extraordinary sensual precision.
Updike’s Method
The early stories demonstrate Updike’s particular genius: the rendering of ordinary American life — suburban, middle-class, domestic — with a precision and beauty that reveals the extraordinary within the ordinary. No American writer since Henry James has attended so carefully to the physical textures of daily experience: the light on a kitchen counter, the weight of a child in one’s arms, the exact sensation of a wool overcoat in November.
His method is essentially lyric — the stories work less through plot than through the accumulation of precise observation toward a moment of epiphany or loss. The comparison with Chekhov is not mere flattery: both writers build stories from the surfaces of ordinary life and arrive at emotional depths without apparent effort.
Collecting The Early Stories
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003): Large-format cloth binding with dust jacket. Substantial volume (838 pages).
Identification points:
- Alfred A. Knopf imprint
- “First Edition” with Knopf number line
- 838 pages
- 103 stories
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $50–$150. Large first printing from a major publisher; not scarce.
Signed copies: $200–$500. Updike was a generous signer throughout his career.
The book’s value is primarily literary rather than monetary — it is the definitive edition of one of the supreme bodies of short fiction in American literature.