Olinger Stories Explained

Olinger Stories: A Selection
Author:John Updike
Country:United States
Language:English
Genre:Short Stories
Pub Date:1964
Media Type:Paperback
Pages:191
Oclc:231946

Olinger Stories: A Selection is a collection of 11 works of short fiction by John Updike published by Vintage Books in 1964.[1]

The short stories, set in the fictional town of Olinger, Pennsylvania are in large part autobiographical, about a boy growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, and his experiences as he reaches adolescence and manhood. As presented in Olinger Stories: A Selection the stories match the fictional chronology “which follow a single narrator through his adolescence, marriage, and divorce.”[2] [3]

The volume includes stories previously collected in Updike's The Same Door (1959) and Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962).

Stories

All of the selections in this volume originally appeared in The New Yorker. Three of the works were previously collected in The Same Door (1959), and seven had been published in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962). “In Football Season” had not been previously collected.[4]

Critical Assessment

Literary critic Jane Barnes offers this appraisal of Updike's autobiographical works in the collection:

Theme

Literary critic Arthur Mizener identifies Updike's literary romanticism as key to his Olinger stories:

Appraising Updike's use of autobiography to examine his own personal and artistic development, author and critic Joyce Carol Oates invokes William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1951):

Updike on Olinger Stories

In the Vintage edition foreword, Updike explains, "Three of these stories are from my collection, The Same Door; seven are from Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories; and one, the last, has not previously been included in any book. All were first printed in The New Yorker. They have been arranged here in the order of the hero's age; in the beginning he is ten, in the middle stories he is an adolescent, in the end he has reached manhood. He wears different names and his circumstances vary, but he is at bottom the same boy, a local boy—this selection could be called A Local Boy. The locality is that of Olinger, Pennsylvania, a small town bounded on the urban side by Alton and on the rural side by Firetown. The name Olinger (pronounced with a long O, a hard g, and the emphasis on the first syllable) was coined, to cap a rebuke, in a story called 'The Alligators'. . . Fiction must recommend itself or remain unrecommended. But if of my stories I had to pick a few to represent me, they would, I suppose, for reasons only partially personal, be these."[5]

Sources

Notes and References

  1. Olster, 2006 p. 179
  2. Barnes, 1981 p. 111:
  3. Pritchard, 2000 p. 65: The Olinger Stories “arranges the stories according to the age of Updike’s protagonist - high school boy, young married man visiting his parents after spending a year in England, older father of four returning, in fact of imagination to the Pennsylvania farm.”
  4. Carduff, Christopher. 2013. Ref. 1 pp. 910-924
  5. Book: Olinger Stories: A Selection . New York . Vintage Books . 2014 . May 7, 2021.