Exhibit B: John Updike's Doodles

John Updike enrolled at Harvard in 1950 with dreams of becoming not an author, but a professional cartoonist. During his freshman year, he started drawing for the Harvard Lampoon, hoping it would land him his ultimate job: Disney animator. Over the next four years, Updike did dozens of illustrations, cartoons, and covers for the humor magazine (including the five pictured here), and became its editor in his junior year.

To see a slide show of John Updike's cartoons, click here.

An offer from Disney never materialized. But Updike was pursuing writing, too—
he twice tried joining Harvard's premier creative-writing class, only to be turned away both times—and had been contributing poems and short stories to the Lampoon along with his drawings. The month he put out his final issue, the New Yorker accepted two of his prose submissions, an event he called "the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life." Exchanging pencil for typewriter, Updike embarked on his half-century career as an author, writing 61 books (his last will be released in June) and winning two Pulitzers before passing away in January. Still, Updike's first passion was never far from his thoughts: "One can continue to cartoon, in a way, with words," he once said. "For whatever crispness and animation my writing has, I give some credit to the cartoonist manqué."