John Updike
THE EARLY
STORIES
1953-197$
HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Foreword
ix
OLINGER STORIES
You'll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You
The Alligators
Pigeon Feathers
Friends from Philadelphia
A Sense of Shelter
Flight
The Happiest I've Been
The Persistence of Desire
The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble,
and Fanning Island
Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car
In Football Season
3
7
13
34
41
52
67
81
91
102
122
OUT IN THE WORLD
The Lucid Eye in Silver Town
The Kid's Whistling
Ace in the Hole
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth
The Christian Roommates
Dentistry and Doubt
129
138
144
152
161
184
Contents
vi
A Madman
Still Life
Home
Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?
His Finest Hour
A Trillion Feet of Gas
Dear Alexandres
The Doctor's Wife
At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie
190
201
214
225
237
248
257
261
269
MARRIED LIFE
Toward Evening
Snowing in Greenwich Village
Sunday Teasing
Incest
A Gift from the City
Walter Briggs
The Crow in the Woods
Should Wizard Hit Mommy?
Wife-Wooing
Unstuck
Giving Blood
Twin Beds in Rome
Marching through Boston
Nakedness
283
288
296
303
315
334
340
344
350
354
361
372
380
389
FAMILY LIFE
The Family Meadow
The Day of the Dying Rabbit
How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time
The Music School
Man and Daughter in the Cold
The Rescue
Plumbing
397
401
411
416
421
428
436
Contents
The Orphaned Syimming Pool
When Everyone Was Pregnant
Eros Rampant
Sublimating
Nevada
The Gun Shop
Son
Daughter, Last Glimpses of
Vll
.
442
446
451
462
470
480
491
496
THE TWO ISEULTS
Solitaire
Leaves
The Stare
Museums and Women
Avec la Bebe-Sitter
Four Sides of One Story
The Morning
My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails
Harv Is Plowing Now
I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me
505
510
514
520
530
537
546
552
559
564
TARBOX TALES
The Indian
The Hillies
The Tarbox Police
The Corner
A&P
Lifeguard
The Deacon
The Carol Sing
The Taste of Metal
Your Lover Just Called
Commercial
Minutes of the Last Meeting
573
579
584
589
596
602
608
614
618
623
630
636
Contents
viii
Believers
Eclipse
/
640
645
FAR OUT
Archangel
The Dark
The Astronomer
The Witnesses
A Constellation of Events
Ethiopia
Transaction
Augustine's Concubine
During the Jurassic
Under the Microscope
The Baluchitherium
The Invention of the Horse Collar
Jesus on Honshu
The Slump
The Sea's Green Sameness
-
649
651
656
661
666
675
682
702
708
713
716
719
723
727
730
THE SINGLE LIFE
The Bulgarian Poetess
The Hermit
I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying
Separating
Gesturing
Killing
Problems
The Man Who Loved Extinct Mammals
Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer
737
7 51
765
788
799
810
820
82 3
829
Index of Titles
835