And, according to Johnson, the young writer’s funniest work at the Lampoon never appeared in print. Staff members would regularly enter notes and jokes in a comment book kept open inside the building.

“I often thought that some of the witticisms that John put in that book were some of the cleverest things he ever did,” Johnson says. “Some were not printable.”

Updike’s undergraduate attentions were not confined to his extracurricular interests, though.

“It was perfectly evident that he pursued his studies with the same zeal and excellence that he turned out for the Lampoon,” Limpert says.

As Updike left swimming tests and youthful phobias behind, he found his niche in Harvard’s humanities. According to his son David Updike ’79, John sometimes spoke with special fondness about a Chaucer class taught by Professor William Alfred.

“Trying to picture an especially happy self,” he writes in his memoirs, “I come up with a Harvard student—a junior, I think, cockily at home by now in the English department.”

Updike, in fact, excelled academically and was one of eight students in his class to get elected to Phi Beta Kappa during his junior year.

And the same perfectionism that impelled him forward in the Lampoon lay behind this academic success. He researched a thesis called “Non-Horatian Elements in Robert Herrick’s Imitations and Echoes of Horace” and was frustrated when it didn’t snag a summa grade.

“He got a magna and I think that still sort of irritates him,” laughs his son.

But in June of 1954 Updike graduated summa cum laude. In his alumni reports, he has upheld this academic training as preparation for the critical work—such as his frequent reviews for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books—that have increasingly become a part of his corpus in the 50 years that followed.

EARLY STARTS

Updike’s interest in drawing also flavored his academic career, carrying him into the Fine Arts department (now History of Art and Architecture) and eventually into marriage with Mary E. Pennington ’52.

“The girl who was to become my wife was standing at the top of some stone museum steps that I was climbing,” explains the narrator of “Museums and Women,” the title story of a 1972 collection. “Though it was bitterly cold, with crusts of snow packed into the stone, she wore threadbare sneakers from which her little toes stuck out, and she was smoking….I pursued her through the museum. It was, as museums go, rather intimate, built around a skylight-roofed replica of a sixteenth-century Italian courtyard.”

Like his narrator, Updike followed Pennington, herself a Fine Arts concentrator, through the Fogg and a few more classes in the department. In June of 1953, at the end of Updike’s junior year, they were married. Updike moved out of Lowell House and into an apartment at 79 Martin St., where he remained through his senior year.

Contemporaries say marriage during college was unusual in the mid-1950s, but no cause for a raised eyebrow. In subsequent accounts and interviews, Updike himself has cited different reasons for marrying at 21.