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. He was the author of more than sixty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Howells Medal, among other honors. He died in 2009.

Christopher Carduff is the Books Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He is editor of John Updike's posthumous collections Higher Gossip (essays & criticism), Always Looking (writings on art), Selected Poems, and Collected Stories, and is also the editor of the Library of America editions of William Maxwell and John Updike.