NewsHour: John Updike on why he doesn't write science fiction Popular Culture/ Writers

"JEFFREY BROWN: You didn't need grand, epic...

JOHN UPDIKE: I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality. I also read a lot of mystery novels, and my few attempts to begin a mystery novel fell apart. So I was stuck from my own limits, really, with middle- class... middle-class life, or the mundane, let's call it, and so I was just trying to, story by story, encapsulate some aspect of life as I was experiencing it or observing it. This was a time when the American way of life was coming in for a lot of hard knocks, some of them deserved, but nevertheless I thought that somebody should be bearing witness to the kind of ordinary life that was going on. Under the revolution, under the talk of the revolution, people were living out their lives in families, by and large, growing up with their children, all that kind of thing."