The Wall Street Journal, Friday, Oct. 17, 2025

 

Photo credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images. American author and Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike in a youthful portrait.

In his review of a “Selected Letters of John Updike [1]” (The Wall Street Journal, Bookshelf, Oct. 11), Thomas Mallon writes that throughout the novelist’s life “he had a panoply of discouraging but not-terribly-threatening illnesses: asthma, dental failures and, above all, psoriasis.”

 

That’s true but incomplete. Mr. Mallon might have mentioned that Updike struggled with stuttering early in his life but that this experience nevertheless encouraged him to become a writer. “You know, you write because you don’t talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn’t an orator,” he said in a 2004 interview. He also added that “those who stutter win, in the painful pauses of their demonstration that speech isn’t entirely natural, a respectful attention, a tender alertness. Words are precious.”

 

Over many years Updike allowed my foundation to use his image on posters of famous people who stutter. His example continues to encourage young people like him.

 

Jane Fraser

The Stuttering Foundation

Memphis, Tenn.