The Poorhouse Fair

THE POORHOUSE FAIR was John Updike's first full length novel, published four years after he graduated from Harvard. It concerns the events surrounding a fair put on by members of a poorhouse and is an allegory about charity. Short and succinct, it speaks to those fears all of us have of growing not old, but dependent.

"Since the successful poetic novel--for lack of a more precise term--has long been the most rarefied form of prose fiction, John Updike, the poet and short story writer, has done a startling thing in his first novel...by producing, with almost academic precision, a classic, if not flawless, example of one." --Whitney Balliett, writing in The New Yorker

John Updike?was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including?The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich,?and?Rabbit at Rest,?won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009.