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In his senior year at Harvard, John Updike took a seminar with the poet Edwin Honig, in which he fell in love with the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Reading all of Harmonium and Stevens’s Selected Poems , he threw himself into his first paper with great gusto.  It was with less enthusiasm that he received his grade: a gentleman’s C+. “Honig said I tried to cover too much,” wrote Updike. “Better from narrow to broad than from broad to narrow, was the life-lesson this comedian as the letter C taught me.”

This lesson would prove lasting. With Updike’s passing in January, the literary world has seized upon the gemlike aspect of his work, his vivid and precise descriptions of specific moments that bloom like wildflowers into meditations on American life. “He took the novel onto another plane of intimacy: he took us beyond the bedroom and into the bathroom,” wrote Martin Amis in The Guardian. Updike was, to many, a master seismologist, tracing the fine cracks in the surface of the social, revealing the tremors behind the white house and picket fence. “Religion, sex, science, urban decay, small-town life, the life of the heart, the betrayals—who can follow him?” asked Ian McEwan.

In the foothills of this intellectual Olympus, however, resided a number of slightly less enamored gods. Gore Vidal’s complaint that Updike “describes to no purpose” reflected the sentiment of many critics who saw no grander project in Updike’s minutely focused details. He was, wrote James Wood, “a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough.” The most damning praise of all came from David Foster Wallace, who once claimed that “no U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist’s terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the 60’s and 70’s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.”

Wallace hit on something profound about his subject, though his charge was meant as a criticism. Updike may indeed have been “self-absorbed”—to him, subjectivity dominated through “secret channels,” and outer reality and the universe had a personal structure. But he was also deeply concerned with the social. By digging deeply inward and knowing himself, Updike genuinely believed that he would be better able to understand, in a metaphysical sense, those around him as well. There is, then, no contradiction between Updike’s acclaim as a genius of social description and the accusations leveled against him of solipsism. In an essay on Walt Whitman, he called it “egotheism”—the idea that “billions of consciousnesses silt history full, and every one of them the center of the universe.”

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One April evening in 1980, Updike found himself standing alone in Shillington, Pennsylvania, the town where he had grown up, with nothing but the clothes on his back. He had come down from Boston to visit his mother, but the airport had failed to send along his luggage with his flight. So while he waited for a girl from Allentown to come down with his two bags, he decided to kill time by taking a stroll through the streets. Passing Henry’s Variety Store, Artie Hoyer’s barber shop, Grace Lutheran Church, the local elementary school, and other landmarks of his youth—some replaced, some still standing—sent him spiraling back into the past and into himself, in a curious mixture of philosophy and memory: “Dasein. The first mystery that confronts us is ‘Why me?’ The next is ‘Why here?’ Shillington was my here.” He writes:

Toward the end of Philadelphia Avenue, beside the park that surrounds the town hall, I turned and looked back up the straight sidewalk in the soft evening gloom… The pavement squares, the housefronts, the remaining trees receded in silence and shadow. I loved this plain street, where for thirteen years no great harm had been allowed to befall me. I loved Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one’s own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being… If there was a meaning to existence, I was closest to it here.