THE POORHOUSE FAIR was John Updike's first full length novel, published four years after he graduated from Harvard. It concerns the events surrounding a fair put on by members of a poorhouse and is an allegory about charity. Short and succinct, it speaks to those fears all of us have of growing not old, but dependent.

"Since the successful poetic novel--for lack of a more precise term--has long been the most rarefied form of prose fiction, John Updike, the poet and short story writer, has done a startling thing in his first novel...by producing, with almost academic precision, a classic, if not flawless, example of one." --Whitney Balliett, writing in The New Yorker