The Complete Henry Bech

by John Updike, Malcolm Bradbury (Introduction)

Overview

From a master of American letters and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series comes his charming Henry Bech stories—collected in one volume for the first time, and featuring a final, series-capping story. 

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.  

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375411762
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/27/2001
Series:	Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	758,086
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.31(h) x 1.24(d)

About the Author

JOHN UPDIKE was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2009.

Date of Birth:

March 18, 1932

Date of Death:

January 27, 2009

Place of Birth:

Shillington, Pennsylvania

Place of Death:

Beverly Farms, MA

Education:

A.B. in English, Harvard University, 1954; also studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England

Editorial Reviews

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

"One of Updike’s best creations." —Life

"Bech is Updike’s alter ego, a mouthpiece for Updike’s often sarcastic, even caustic insight into writers and the writing life … [His] style is never more jubilantly elaborate than in a Bech book, and his intelligence never more provocatively displayed." —Booklist

"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

From the Publisher

Never as big as Rabbit, but a genial antihero in his own right, Henry Bech is John Updike's fictional alter ego, a Jewish writer with a weakness for women and literary awards. Now, three bestselling collections of Bech stories are gathered in one volume, under the title The Complete Henry Bech. Book-ended with a helpful introduction by Malcolm Bradbury and a new story, "His Oeuvre," the hefty Everyman's Library compendium is a monument to Updike's lighter moments. ( Mar. 27) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Tales of John Updike's playful alter ago began appearing over thirty years ago in The New Yorker: in The Complete Henry Bech they have been gathered under one cover for the first time, providing a complete and unified set of vignettes and stories about Bech, a man who is a cynical, yet spry, globetrotter filled with observations about the world. An excellent collection.

An attractive summary volume brings together the contents of Updike's three earlier collections of tales about the literary and amorous exploits and embarrassments of his "other" alter ego (the obverse of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom): the unproductive, easily distracted American-Jewish novelist (and improbably Nobel laureate) Henry Bech. It's prefaced by fellow novelist-critic Malcolm Bradbury's incisive Introduction, and ends with the previously uncollected "His Oeuvre," a story depicting the elderly Bech on a reading tour during which he reencounters and/or remembers the parade of lovers who, he now realizes, "were . . . [his] masterpieces." It's a curious, though not inappropriate coda to a richly amusing extended work that surveys the contemporary American literary landscape with piercing wit. A goldmine for future Updike scholars.

Kirkus Reviews