[Servalan]

John Updike, verfaßte in seiner Jugend Comics und Cartoons für The Harvard Lampoon. Vor gut einem halben erschien ein Beitrag von Literaturnobelpreisträger Orhan Pamuk über Updikes gescheiterte Ambitionen als Comiczeichner in der New York Times (17. April 2014):

Updike at Rest
Adam Begley’s ‘Updike’
At first, he wanted to be a graphic artist. In 1954, John Updike — age 22, newly married and fresh out of Harvard, where he’d studied English literature and taken art courses — was awarded a fellowship to study abroad, and decided to apply to the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford, England. Asked to explain this decision, Updike replied, “It’s always been my ambition to be the next Walt Disney.” During his childhood in Shillington, Pa., where he lived until the age of 13 and which his readers know through his Olinger stories, his mother, Linda, arranged for her prodigiously talented son to take lessons from a local artist. Later, when they moved to Plowville, 11 miles from Shillington, to a farmhouse he would describe in his novel “Of the Farm,” Updike — now 14 or 15 — began sending his drawings and cartoons to The New Yorker and other publications. For Updike, who was interested in drawing but also, like his mother, in writing, to be published in The New Yorker had been an ambition, if not an obsession, from the moment the magazine first entered the household when he was 12.
Reminiscing about his childhood in an introduction to a collection of his drawings and cartoons for The Harvard Lampoon, he wrote: “I copied comic-strip characters on plywood and cut them out. . . . I drew caricatures of my classmates; I became the class poster-maker.” In his early novel “The Centaur,” based on his school days and his feelings about his parents, the protagonist is, like Updike, an admirer of Vermeer and an aspiring painter. But as Adam Begley informs us in “Updike,” his brilliant new biography, while still at Harvard Updike was already “rethinking his ambitions, largely because he now recognized that he was a better writer than a cartoonist.”
This well-researched, considerate and almost affectionate biography illustrates how Updike was so fond of Mickey Mouse he could draw the character from memory even in old age — but it also reminds us that behind his youthful desire to be the next Walt Disney lay the fact that “Peter Pan” was the highest-grossing movie of the year when Updike was a junior at Harvard. “His elitist education hadn’t dimmed his enthusiasm for a medium with mass appeal,” Begley writes. Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished material, this book demonstrates that Updike was aware of this dualism early on; in a letter from Harvard, Updike “wrote to his mother about what was missing from the American literary scene: ‘We need a writer who desires both to be great and to be popular.’ ” Begley’s highly readable biography shows us how the tension between these two essential desires both formed and limited Updike’s life and his immense literary achievement. Updike took his ambition to become someone important, and special, from his mother, and the need to be an ordinary person, just like everyone else, from his father. William Maxwell, who began to publish Updike’s stories in The New Yorker just after John graduated from Harvard, would have this to say about these diverging aspects of Updike’s personality: “I knew that he couldn’t be that talented and perceptive and still be a country boy.”