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  • Published: 24 April 1997
  • ISBN: 9780140255898
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $54.99

In the Beauty of the Lilies





First time in Modern Classics

One hot afternoon in 1910, the Reverend Clarence Wilmot, standing in the rectory of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, experiences the last vestiges of his faith departing. True to this revelation, Clarence abandons the pulpit and becomes an encyclopedia salesman. What follows is the saga of the Wilmot family, one wandering tapestry thread within the American century. This is the story of Clarence's postman son, of his granddaughter, Esther, whose prayers are always answered and who becomes a twentieth century goddess, and of her son, in whom the passion that has long simmered, hidden in the corners of American life, comes to a boil.

  • Published: 24 April 1997
  • ISBN: 9780140255898
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $54.99

About the author

John Updike

JOHN UPDIKE was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.

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