Olinger Stories


Olinger Stories: A Selection is a collection of 11 works of short fiction by John Updike published by Vintage Books in 1964.
The short stories, set in the fictional town of Olinger, Pennsylvania are in large part autobiographical, about a boy growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, and his experiences as he reaches adolescence and manhood. As presented in Olinger Stories: A Selection the stories match the fictional chronology "which follow a single narrator through his adolescence, marriage, and divorce."
The volume includes stories previously collected in Updike's The Same Door and Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories.

Stories

All of the selections in this volume originally appeared in The New Yorker. Three of the works were previously collected in The Same Door, and seven had been published in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories. "In Football Season" had not been previously collected.
  • "You'll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You"
  • "The Alligators"
  • "Pigeon Feathers"
  • "Friends from Philadelphia"
  • "A Sense of Shelter"
  • "Flight"
  • "The Happiest I've Been"
  • "The Persistence of Desire"
  • "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island"
  • "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car"
  • "In Football Season"

    Critical assessment

Literary critic Jane Barnes offers this appraisal of Updike's autobiographical works in the collection:

Theme

Literary critic Arthur Mizener identifies Updike's literary romanticism as key to his Olinger stories:
Appraising Updike's use of autobiography to examine his own personal and artistic development, author and critic Joyce Carol Oates invokes William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun :

Updike on ''Olinger Stories''

In the Vintage edition foreword, Updike explains, "Three of these stories are from my collection, The Same Door; seven are from Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories; and one, the last, has not previously been included in any book. All were first printed in The New Yorker. They have been arranged here in the order of the hero's age; in the beginning he is ten, in the middle stories he is an adolescent, in the end he has reached manhood. He wears different names and his circumstances vary, but he is at bottom the same boy, a local boy—this selection could be called A Local Boy. The locality is that of Olinger, Pennsylvania, a small town bounded on the urban side by Alton and on the rural side by Firetown. The name Olinger was coined, to cap a rebuke, in a story called 'The Alligators'... Fiction must recommend itself or remain unrecommended. But if of my stories I had to pick a few to represent me, they would, I suppose, for reasons only partially personal, be these."