Golf Dreams - by John Updike (Paperback)

About the Book

"Memories in this collection, drawn mainly from magazine pieces, constitute a championship round. . . . This unbridled appreciation of golf's mystical opportunities for grace and redemption will enthrall even those who have never followed an 80-yard worm-burner with an elegant chip to the pin" ("People").

Book Synopsis

John Updike wrote about the lure of golf for five decades, from the first time he teed off at the age of twenty-five until his final rounds at the age of seventy-six. Golf Dreams collects the most memorable of his golf pieces, high-spirited evidence of his learning, playing, and living for the game. The camaraderie of golf, the perils of its present boom, how to relate to caddies, and how to manage short putts are among the topics he addresses, sometimes in lyrical essays, sometimes in light verse, sometimes in wickedly comic fiction. All thirty pieces have the lilt of a love song, and the crispness of a firm chip stiff to the pin.

Review Quotes

"Limber and sprightly, unique, alive . . . Updike understands golf, keenly, and expresses his understanding with charm and beauty, in words as sturdy as Lee Trevino's stance."--Sports Illustrated

"A book written under a clear blue sky with an utterly pure swing . . . Here, Updike waltzes about the heavens of Nabokov, in pure esthetic bliss. And here his transcendental agonies and anxieties fuse into split-second moments of impact that lift us from sand pit to rhapsody."--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"[Golf Dreams clears] the hazards with ease and grace. [Updike] is eloquent on the pleasures and frustrations of the game [and] even better at dramatizing its mysterious pull."--The New York Times

About the Author

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. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.