"Don't worry about invading my privacy--I do it myself all the time," said Updike, encouraging questioners at a Learning from Performers session in Lowell House on May 1. JON CHASE A copy of the 1961 Deutsch edition of Rabbit Run, from which material then thought unfit to print had been excised, with those parts restored by Updike for the 1964 Penguin edition. At the Houghton Library. JIM HARRISON

Updike Regnant

The only child of a Pennsylvania schoolteacher and his wife, John Updike '54, L.T.D. '92, had never been away from home for more than a few days until he arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1950. A scholarship covered his $400 tuition. In time he became a junior Phi Beta Kappa and president of the Lampoon, occasionally putting out an issue almost single-handed. "There was the satisfaction of getting published, in however small a world," he recalls. That world has expanded considerably: the four-time National Book Award winner and celebrated author of fiction, poetry, memoirs, essays, and reviews received the Harvard Arts Medal during Arts First weekend in recognition of his literary achievements. He is the first writer so honored. "I've rigged my life so it's as close to being a Harvard student as can be. I still dress like a Harvard student," he said. In college in the 1950s, "We worshiped the cool, detached, modern style of T.S. Eliot--the furled umbrella. That dryness is still part of me. I've never been comfortable with the heated world that has developed since the 1960s."