A Boston pal told me about this. He figured it would put Updike in tight with the Nobel Committee.
The Boston Globe
Honorary degrees redux: Tributes to Updike go on sale
By Michael Levenson, Globe Staff
June 1, 2006
One can picture him sitting there in flowing robes, smiling his warm, wry smile, as the words are read aloud before a sea of admiring graduates.
In 1998, Bates College, reaching for the highest of rhetoric, lauded him for his “Apollonian insight into the human condition.”
A decade earlier, Dartmouth College, at its 218th commencement, paid homage to him because, it said, he “illuminated the moral questions that trouble our hearts as we seek to be worthy persons, parents, sons and daughters.”
So how much are these loftily bestowed honorary degrees really worth to the man who received them, the beloved American writer and longtime Beverly resident, John Updike?
Well, not as much as you might think. Just stroll into Artists and Authors bookshop in Marblehead center, and there they are, still in their embossed cases, for sale in a stack on a glass bookshelf.
The going rate? About $750.
Please read the entire article here.
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Actual photo: Dina Rudick/Globe Staff