The Shillington Omnibus

From "John Updike, 1932-2009" by Michael Dirda in The Chronicle Review section of The Chronicle of Higher Education:

For more than 50 years, John Updike was always, reliably there, the greatest all-round man of letters of our time. And yet he started out just wanting to be "a magazine writer, a wordsmith as the profession was understood in the industrial first half of the century." While still in his 20s, he consequently made himself into a one-man New Yorker. For his favorite magazine, Updike supplied short stories, reviews, interviews, light verse, Talk of the Town features, pieces on golf and baseball, translations, memoirs, parodies, chapters from new novels, and cartoons. As if that weren't enough to keep him occupied, in later years he began to turn out art criticism for The New York Review of Books. When and how did he ever find the time? Updike appeared everywhere: in Playboy and Vogue, in Architectural Digest and The Wallace Stevens Journal, in US Airways magazine and Michigan Quarterly Review. Nothing cultural or American or literary was alien to him. He could memorialize the great slugger Ted Williams, provide a list of the 10 greatest works of literature for The World Almanac, produce genial reflections on book envelopes and pinup girls and Mickey Mouse and Kierkegaard and his own psoriasis.