John Updike, lung cancer
First, a confession. Even though I was an English major years ago, I haven’t read much fiction after the shock of my first wife’s unexpected death in her forties twenty years ago, and this includes the works of John Updike. Only the directness of nonfiction and poetry have been able to penetrate the shell of reality.
I don’t know much about Updike’s cancer. Updike didn’t, either. He knew he had cancer for only one month before he died. I found half a dozen poems in his last poetry book, Endpoint and Other Poems (2009), published after his death. That’s a small amount of material to form any conclusions. The other poems in this collection were written over a number of years.
