Thursday, November 10

From today’s Harvard Gazette:

Almost three years ago, two archivists from Harvard’s Houghton Library appeared at author John Updike’s front door in Beverly. Barely three weeks later, America’s master stylist would die from lung cancer. “He knew it was time,” said Leslie Morris, Houghton’s curator of modern books and manuscripts. “He asked us to come.”

Leaning on a walker, Updike chatted with Morris and her assistant while they packed cartons in his upstairs study. Into one box went the unfinished novel from his writing desk.

Updike had wanted to know that the outward signs of his literary ardor — decades of handwritten drafts, typescripts, galleys, and research files — would survive him. And he knew death was near. “Old age,” he had written in a short story, “arrived in increments of uncertainty.”

But there was no uncertainty about what should happen next at Houghton, the first building at an American university that was designed to house rare books and manuscripts. For decades, Houghton had been collecting the material now known as the John Updike Archive, which will be fully cataloged and ready for researchers by next summer.

In the end, the lives and thoughts of literary greats live on through their work and papers. Houghton and other Harvard libraries carefully tend the records left by dozens of prominent authors, providing pivotal research material for scholars.