Dear John

“Celebrated American novelist, poet and art critic John Hoyer Updike attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford with the ambition of becoming a cartoonist. When he returned to the United States, Updike moved to New York, where he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker. This marked the beginning of a prolific professional writing career, during which the author published a book a year on average. Updike died in Massachusetts in 2009, eleven years before Beth would accidentally recall his ghost to her studio in the High Street in Michaelmas term of this winter, and where she left him sitting for a portrait.”