Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism

Volume, measuring approximately 6.75" x 9.75", is bound in red cloth, with stamped silver lettering to spine and front cover. Book and dust jacket, with price of $40 on front flap, are like new. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover. xxii/703 pages.

"Here Updike considers many books, some in introductions—to such classics as "Walden," "The Portrait of a Lady," and "The Mabinogion"—and many more in reviews, usually for The New Yorker. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the five Biblical books of Moses come in for appraisal, along with "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "The Wizard of Oz."

Contemporary American and English writers—Colson Whitehead, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Norman Rush, William Trevor, A. S. Byatt, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwan—receive attentive and appreciative reviews, as do Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Günter Grass, and Orhan Pamuk.

In factual waters, Mr. Updike ponders the sinking of the Lusitania and the "unsinkable career" of Coco Chanel, the adventures of Lord Byron and Iris Murdoch, the sexual revolution and the advent of female Biblical scholars, and biographies of Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Marcel Proust, and Søren Kierkegaard."