John Updike’s first collection of nonfiction pieces, published in 1965 when the author was thirty-three, is a diverting and illuminating gambol through midcentury America and the writer’s youth. It opens with a choice selection of parodies, casuals, and “Talk of the Town” reports, the fruits of Updike’s boyish ambition to follow in the footsteps of Thurber and White. These jeux d’esprit are followed by “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” an immortal account of Ted Williams’s last at-bat in Fenway Park; “The Dogwood Tree,” a Wordsworthian evocation of one Pennsylvania childhood; and five autobiographical essays and stories. Rounding out the volume are classic considerations of Nabokov, Salinger, Spark, Beckett, and others, the earliest efforts of the book reviewer who would go on to become, in The New York Times ’s estimation, “the pre-eminent critic of his generation.” Updike called this collection “motley but not unshapely.” Some would call it a classic of its kind. “ Assorted Prose [delivers] wonderfully funny parodies, brilliant analyses of style, passionate memories, stunning forays into love and expectation and cruelty, and a voice very much involved with the extraordinary act of living, the art of wonder, the art of art.”— The New York Times Book Review   “John Updike has never yet parted with a word before its shape conformed to the creator’s purpose. . . . [For those] who didn’t see it in The New Yorker in 1960, his grandstand account of Ted Williams’s last trip to the plate (Williams hit a home run) is worth the full price of admission to these pages.”— Time   “Fascinating . . . Updike’s versatility is as apparent as his mastery of the language.”— Saturday Review John Updike, known for his fiction and poetry, has assembled a motely but not unshapely collection of assorted non-fictional prose written during the last ten years. 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. Parodies   THE AMERICAN MAN: WHAT OF HIM?   (An Editorial Left Out of Life’s Special 35¢ Issue: “The American Woman”)   EVER SINCE the history-dimmed day when Christopher Columbus, a Genoese male, turned his three ships (Niña, Pinta, Santa María) toward the United States, men have also played a significant part in the development of our nation. Lord Baltimore, who founded the colony of Maryland for Roman Catholics driven by political persecution from Europe’s centuries-old shores, was a man. So was Wyatt Earp, who brought Anglo-Saxon common law into a vast area then in the grip of a potpourri of retributive justice, “vigilantism,” and the ancient Code Napoléon. Calvin Coolidge, the thirtieth Chief Executive, was male. The list could be extended indefinitely.   Things were not always easy for the American Man. He came here in his water-weathered ships and did not find broad thruways, “cloud-capped towers,” and a ready-made Free Way of LIFE. No, what he found confronting him in this fabled New Land was, principally, trees. Virgin, deciduous, hundreds of feet taller than he, the trees of the Colonization left their scars on his mental makeup in the form of the high rates of alcoholism, suicide, and divorce that distinguish him from the men of Continental Europe or Australasia. While his brethren of the Old World were dandling perfumed coquettes on their silk-garbed knees, he was forging inward, across the Appalachians to the Great Prairie, where his woods-tested faith, tempered in the forge of Valley Forge and honed on the heights of Montcalm’s Quebec, took on a new austerity and became Evangelical Methodism. The Chevaliers of France didn’t give him pause, nor the wetbacks of Mexico. But he did not emerge on the spray-moistened cliffs of California the same man who sailed from Southampton, Brussels, or Rügen. As Robert Frost says, in his quietly affirmative lines:   The land was ours before we were the land’s.… Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed.   What is it that distinguishes the American Man from his counterparts in other climes; what is it that makes him so special? He is religious. He is quietly affirmative. He is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. He carries his burdens lightly, his blessings responsibly. Unlike the Oriental mandarin, he shaves his upper lip. Nor does he let his fingernails grow. Unlike the men of England, he does not wear gloves. Generally, he is taller than the m