Hugging the Shore Essays and Criticism

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, Hugging the Shore is an enormously intelligent, witty collection of essays by John Updike. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist sheds keen light on everything from the first kiss to going barefoot to the world's greatest writers. First time in paper.

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.