This paper challenges the prevailing notions that John Updike's fiction was mostly apolitical by offering a fresh and unorthodox reading of his debut novelThe Poorhouse Fair(1958). It argues that Updike's application of political metaphor to an ostensibly placid plot that revolves around a New Jersey retirement home illuminates mounting disagreements within the New Deal order regarding power, liberty, democracy, and religion. Unlike conventional narratives that attribute the decline of liberalism in the 1960s to external factors such as Vietnam, racial strife, counterculture, and postindustrialism, this counterintuitive reading of Updike reveals that latent internal philosophical tensions were embedded within liberalism long before these formidable challenges materialized.
This article, through a close engagement with John Updike's work, explores the manner in which the postwar liberal temper shaped American fiction. By contextualizing the novelist's early writings within the changing intellectual climate of the period, it demonstrates how his liberal sensibilities deeply informed his literary imagination. The essay employs new archival material about Updike's Harvard education and sketches his political biography—the first of its kind—to offer a fresh and more nuanced understanding of Updike as not only a gifted writer but also a political thinker. Although he chose the less traveled road of fiction to do so, Updike expressed a particular temperament pervasive among many liberal intellectuals at the time. By challenging the widely held view of him as an apolitical writer, the article also enriches our understanding of the meanings and complexities of postwar liberalism while illuminating the often overlooked link between literature and politics.
How does tragedy, primarily a dramatic-literary experience, shape politics? While scholars have mostly looked to classical tragedy and expressions of public mourning to answer this, I employ a policy-oriented case study to do so: the politics of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Widely known for his data-driven social science, I want to suggest the counterintuitive claim that the popular senator from New York was ironically also influenced deeply by literary tragedy. This article demonstrates how Moynihan cultivated a set of tragic sensibilities that informed his realist political calculations and implanted in his policies a tragic awareness that limited the goals of what government could achieve, while helping define what it should and how. Rather than evaluate the validity of his controversial proposals from the 1960s, I offer a critical reexamination that highlights the tragic impulses coloring them. In the process, I conceptualize a politics of tragedy as a “tamed” form of postwar liberalism.
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