On March 19, Knopf and the New Yorker hosted a tribute at the New York Public Library to the writer John Updike, who died on January 27th at the age of 76. Lorrie Moore, Adam Gopnik, Chip McGrath, Deborah Garrison, and ZZ Packer read selections from the author’s work; Sonny Mehta, David Remnick, Judith Jones, and Roger Angell reminisced about the great passion Updike felt for writing and the entire publishing process. “Books,” Updike once said, “are what make us human.”
The evening closed with an audio clip of John Updike reading from “The Alligators,” a selection from his Selected Stories, that was originally recorded by Random House AudioBooks in in 1985.