Research Guides: A &amp; P: Critical Articles

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Articles

" Checking Out Faith and Lust: Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown' and Updike's 'A & P" by' Patrick W. Shaw
Shaw suggests that “A & P” alludes to Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown” and emphasizes the story's motifs of repression and eroticism.
"Updike's 'A & P.'" by Corey Evan Thompson
Thompson examines the protagonist's fixation with the young girls in "A & P."
"A&P: Overview" by Bruce Kellner
Reduced to a plot summary, John Updike's "A&P" is unpromising: a grocery store manager admonishes some girls for shopping in their bathing suits, and a young cashier quits his job because he has been attracted to one of them and wants to make an impression. Updike, however, has constructed a highly entertaining moral tale in "A&P," guaranteed to amuse but in the end to instruct with bittersweet wisdom that grows from the magic in the telling.
" Updike's 'A & P.'" by Harriet Blodgett
Blodgett questions the impulse of critics to make the character of Sammy in "A & P" a serious figure.
" Irony and Innocence in John Updike's 'A & P' " by Lawrence Jay Dessner
Dessner presents insight into the character of Sammy, whom the critic believes does not realize what his real troubles in life will be
"The Art of Fiction XLIII: John Updike" by Charles Thomas Samuels
Presents an interview with author John Updike. When asked about his time working as a staff writer for the "New Yorker" upon graduating from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he responded that the experience allowed him to go to boating and electronic exhibits. Also discussed is the author's time spent living in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
"Giving him his due" by Claire Lowdon
Critical anylisis of Updike's novels through the use of gender, syntax, and metaphor: "Who knows – in another two decades, 2019’s heated discussions about race and gender may look equally quaint. The atrocities we’re unconsciously committing in our novels today are probably something to do with the environment. "

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