The media is full of the death of John Updike, one of America’s finest writers. Tributes from luminaries grace every newspaper, blog and website.

I never cared greatly for his acclaimed ‘Rabbit’ novels, but my tribute to him is to give him his own voice. Here’s an extract from his short story A Soft Spring Night in Shillington, PA (his home town):

A few housefronts farther on, what had been Henry’s Variety Store in the nineteen-forties was still a variety store, with the same narrow flight of cement steps going up to the door beside a big display window. Did children still marvel within as the holidays wheeled past in a slow pinwheel galaxy of altering candies, cards and artifacts, of back-to-school tablets, footballs, Halloween masks, pumpkins, turkeys, pine trees, tinsel, wrappings, reindeer, Santas, and stars, and then the noisemakers and conical hats of New Year’s celebration, and Valentines and cherries as the days of short February brightened, and then shamrocks, painted eggs, flowers and baseballs?

Now there was a writer.

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