10. Updike's 1st wife Mary active supporter of Civil Rights movement. Updike not opposed but his conservative temperament caused friction.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
11. Updike was very conscious that the was winner in the American system - "lucky". Like most winners, uneasy about change.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
12. At civil rights marches, Updike's unease expressed itself with mockery -- he adopted minstrel accents. (See "Marching Through Boston")
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Replying to @HeerJeet
13. Updike's most ambitious 1960s grappling with race is of course "Rabbit Redux" (1971 but set 1969).
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14. In "Rabbit Redux" white middle american Everyman meets hippy feminist and black power radical.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
15. Begley has a high opinion of "Rabbit Redux"; I think it's a disaster but a fruitful one.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
16. In "Rabbit Redux" Updike showed that he had (at least at that time) no ear for black vernacular speech. Black section badly misfires.
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17. Yet Updike in "Redux" was for the first time confronting the non-white world that his earlier fiction had drawn a curtain against.
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18. Out of "Redux" failure, the Rabbit books expand their social field outside Angstrom's personal life and try to encompass America.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
19. In her personal life in 1970s/80s, Updike had to deal with race more directly because a son & daughter both married African immigrants.
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20. So by 1980s Updike literally had an African-American family (in several senses) & had also traveled to Africa, Asia, South America.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
21. Updike's wider engagement with world and changes in family surely fed into The Coup: attempt to see USA through African eyes.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
22. I'd be the last person to describe Updike as racially enlightened.
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