The Same Door Explained

The Same Door
Author:John Updike
Country:United States
Language:English
Genre:Short Stories
Pub Date:1959
Media Type:Print (hardcover)
Pages:241
Isbn:9780394747637
Oclc:OL6272373M

The Same Door is a collection of 16 works of short fiction by John Updike published in 1959 by Alfred A. Knopf. The stories in the volume first appeared separately in The New Yorker, some in a slightly different form than in the collection.[1] The Same Door is Updike's first volume of short stories.[2]

Stories

All the works in this collection first appeared in The New Yorker[3]

Critical Assessment

Writing about the author's second collection, Pigeon Feathers, in The New York Times Book Review, critic Arthur Mizener wrote of Updike's early achievement as a whole:

Professor Richard H. Rupp offers this measured appraisal of The Same Door:

Theme and Style

The collection is divided into stories with a boyish protagonist set in either an unnamed small town or Olinger, Pennsylvania—the fictional name Updike gave to his hometown—and stories set mostly in Manhattan, New York and other cities, including London, with a young adult man often at the center.[4] [5]

The stories that comprise the volume were written over a period of five years, composed between November 1955 to April 1957, and possess some degree of consistency in their style and structure. Indeed, half of the stories, which are set in Manhattan, are “remarkably homogeneous.”[6] [7] Professor Richard H. Rupp writes: “The most obvious characteristic of Updike’s style is his exhaustive exploration of minute physical detail. Even in his first collection, The Same Door, the scene is microscopic.”[8]

Literary critic Robert Detweiler locates the central thematic element of the stories in “the unexpected gifts of personal encounter”, and quotes Updike's remark regarding the Olinger Stories: “The point, to me, is plain…We are all rewarded unexpectedly.”[9] Detwieler acknowledges Updike's debt to James Joyce:

Sources

Notes and References

  1. Detweiler, 1984 p. 8: “The Same Door…a collection of sixteen short stories…” And: Some of the stories appeared in “different form” in collection vs. The New Yorkers.
  2. Detweiler, 1984 p. 3
  3. Carduff, Christopher. 2013. Ref. 1 pp. 910-924
  4. Pritchard, 2000 p. 63: “...written about his boyhood in Pennsylvania…if he had a few stories to represent [himself] these would be the ones…” And: p. 65
  5. Begley, 2014 p. 9
  6. Begley, 2014 p. 126: “...homogeneous…” And
  7. Detweiler, 1984 p. 8
  8. Rupp, 1970 p. 16:
  9. Detweiler, 1984 p. 46: “..unexpected gifts…” And: p. 8: Detweiler provides italics, assumed to be in original Introduction to Olinger Stories (1964), See footnote p. 8, and Chapter Two in Notes and References, Detweiler p. 187

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