Irony vs. Mammon

View from Castle Hill in Ipswich, Mass., one of the North Shore towns that John Updike called home

View from Castle Hill in Ipswich, Mass., one of the North Shore towns that John Updike called home

“I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don’t get hay fever in New England either.”

— John Updike ( 1932-2009), famed novelist and long-time resident of the Massachusetts North Shore, in the Observer of London, 1979