I’m looking for a postcard. There’s no picture on the front; it’s one of those government-issue ones with the address on the front and the back left blank for a message. I think there was a stamp, but I’m not sure.

The message was typed on a manual typewriter. In it, the writer explained why I, an editor in educational publishing, could not delete or use a euphemism for a four-letter word from one of his short stories

Follow up:

for a book we were doing about Pennsylvania history. It was kind and gently humored, one of the best rejections I’ve ever read. Because the book was being prepared at the behest of a Pittsburgh nun, bowing to the author’s request meant we couldn’t include the story, only a brief biography of the native Pennsylvanian.

His name was John Updike, and ever since he died, I’ve been searching for the card, which I initially tacked to the bulletin board over my desk and carried with me when I left the firm. It’s been said that he wrote hundreds, maybe thousands, such postcards. On one hand, he was an unpretentious small-town fellow. On the other, he was a conduit for some of the most lyrical prose that an American has committed to paper.

The postcard confirmed my connection to Updike. I found his short story “Pigeon Feathers,” a transcendent experience when I read it at 24 riding a train across Morocco. Suddenly the exotic landscape gave way to personal exhilaration. Updike had demonstrated that the extraordinariness of the most commonplace small town experiences could be captured in words. I wanted to be a writer.

It was 1967. I went back to Washington and enrolled in a writing class at American University. The teacher liked the short story I wrote and recommended me for the writing program at Johns Hopkins. But in 1968, I attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and had another life-changing experience. Hadn’t I always meant to be a journalist? Could I walk away from public affairs into a literary cocoon?

The decision, like so many in my life, was made on an emotional reaction. I had gone to Baltimore to sit in on a class. It was a writers’ workshop in which someone read a manuscript and the teacher and other students commented on the passage. The class at American was similarly organized, but with one distinction: students in the Hopkins class elaborately deferred to the teacher at every turn. The deference reminded me of the obsequiousness of people in the Congress, where I was working, and that was a strike against it. Then, the teacher cancelled the lunch date he had made with me, because he explained, he had been invited to eat with a distinguished visiting professor. Last, in returning my writing samples, he dropped them at my feet and they scattered. I scrambled in my miniskirt to pick them up and caught the next train back to Washington.

My attempts at writing fiction after that were sporadic. I tried writing a novel set in Washington that I never completed. I spent another five years working daily on a novel set in my childhood that never quite transcended the page. Updike was a believer in writing every day, three pages at minimum, but some people’s three pages sing more than others.

Updike’s was a prodigious talent. Besides his 23 novels, he turned out hundreds of short stories, critical essays, and poems.

So I was bemused to realize that his career got caught up in some of the same social forces that propelled me—the American war in Vietnam and the women’s movement—although our positions were opposite. He supported the first and resisted the latter, and some people never forgave him. It’s even been said that these political positions denied Updike the Nobel Prize.

His ambivalence about women played itself out in every medium, but as far as I can tell, his support for the Vietnam war did not. He never served in the military (“his” war would have been Korea), but it has been said that his outrage at the lack of youthful civility in the sixties kept him from joining the other major literary figures of his age in denouncing the war.

Instead, he took refuge in “Rabbit” Angstrum, a small town Pennsylvania car dealer who was the protagonist in a series of four novels. Some say Rabbit was his alter ego, the man he would have been had he not become a writer. Needless to say, Rabbit did not attend Harvard as Updike did, and I think that’s a bigger difference than occupation.

Updike’s mature style was greatly influenced by his reading of Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust. But his social background in a financially strapped family in a small American town was considerably different from either of the Europeans. (Nabokov was from an aristocratic Russian family, Proust a well-positioned French family.) Marrying the influences of European styles to the character of a crass, openly hungry, minimally educated Pennsylvanian was either Updike’s great accomplishment or his folly. I never felt the pure light of revelation in his Rabbit novels that I felt in his short fiction. The final novel, Rabbit at Rest, brings Angstrum to a mellower place before his death in 1990 at 56. I wished Updike had picked another character or found a style more compatible with the subject. (Of course, that wouldn’t be Updike, but someone else.)

Still, Updike illuminated what Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew identified as the Silent Majority. When we’re all gone, readers will be able to know the psyche of so many Protestant white men who resisted the major social movements of their day, written by a hugely gifted one of their number.

I still want to find that postcard