The Complete Henry Bech
  • Published: 15 October 2006
  • ISBN: 9781857152647
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 552
  • RRP: $32.99

The Complete Henry Bech

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Jun 2006
Paperback
17 Jul 2006
Hardback
15 Oct 2006
Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Find local retailers Find local retailers Abbeys Angus & Robertson Boomerang Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Your Bookstore

The Bech stories-collected in one volume for the first time, and featuring a final, series-capping story, "His Oeuvre"-cast an affectionate eye on the famously unproductive Jewish-American writer, offering up a stream of wit, whimsy, and lyric pungency unmatched in American letters.
"One of Updike's best creations." -Life

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.

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.
  • Published: 15 October 2006
  • ISBN: 9781857152647
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 552
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:
Share…

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.

Also by John Updike

A Child's Calendar (20th Anniversary Edition)
Selected Poems
Olinger Stories
Foreword
John Updike: Novels 1996–2000 (LOA #365)
Buchanan Dying
More Matter
See all

Praise for The Complete Henry Bech

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

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

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