<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=3PMq58_0vjyT0DR00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=3PMq58_0vjyT0DR00" width="1200" height="800" ><figcaption>J. Barrett Realty photo of the Polly Dole house</figcaption></figure>Please Support Local Advertisers326IPSWICH — Named for one its 19th-century owners, Polly Dole, the house on 26 East Street is most famously known as the former residence of author John Updike. And for the first time in nearly 30 years, it just went up for sale.Listed by J. Barrett Realty for $729,000, the Polly Dole house “has elements from 1687, but acquired its current form in 1720,” according to Historic Ipswich.At 2,942 square feet, it sits on 0.24 acres and is being advertised as a multi-family home with two separate, side-by-side units.The house last sold in 1995 for $238,000, according to property tax records.<h2>Updike</h2>After spending their first ten months in Ipswich renting a house on Essex Road, Updike and his first wife, Mary, purchased the Polly Dole house in 1958.Though he would eventually become a titan of American literature, Updike was struggling to break through at the time.He told an editor of The New Yorker magazine that buying the house left him deeply in debt and “quite panicked.”Nobody was showing interest in publishing his first novel, and the 25-year-old Updike knew that he wouldn’t be able to support his growing family by selling only short stories and poems. <figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=48wqBY_0vjyT0DR00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=48wqBY_0vjyT0DR00" width="1200" height="801" ><figcaption>J. Barrett photo</figcaption></figure>But as his decision to purchase the Polly Dole house would seem to suggest, Updike was confident that his artistic abilities would soon turn fortune in his favor.Publisher Alfred A. Knopf accepted his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, just as Updike was settling into the house. He stayed with Knopf for the rest of his career.That partnership proved to be fruitful, as Updike would go on to write 24 more novels and countless short stories, poems, and essays.Over the course of the next 50 years, he won two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, and “just about every other literary accolade short of the Nobel [Prize],” according to the Boston Globe.<h2>Sixties domestic bliss</h2>Updike said of his early years in Ipswich that he experienced a “surge of belonging” and enjoyed the “60s domestic bliss” of a “genteel bohemian” lifestyle.The Updikes decorated the Polly Dole house with antique furniture purchased at local auctions and adorned the walls with Mary’s paintings. And, of course, there were books — lots of books — filling shelves that John built himself, according to biographer Adam Begley.“My wife and I were youngish, and the house suited us just fine. It was Puritan; it was back-to-nature; it was less-is-more,” Updike later wrote in an article for Architectural Digest.He joked to his children that the old house was held together by a large nut and bolt in the middle of a summer beam in the living room.“If we turned the nut, the whole house would fall down. We never tried it.”<h2>Tarbox</h2>Fictional versions of the Polly Dole house serve as the setting for many of Updike’s short stories, most notably in the “Maples Stories” that trace the doomed-to-fail marriage of recurring characters Joan and Richard Maple.The house inhabited by Angela and Piet Hanema, central characters in Updike’s controversial novel Couples (1968), also seems to be based on the East Street home. Set in Tarbox, a thinly-disguised version of Ipswich, Couples tells the tale of 10 boozy and adulterous married couples. Like much of Updike’s work, it is at turns beautifully descriptive, darkly comedic, and morally unsettling.Some locals, including Ipswich Chronicle columnist Kitty Robertson, took Updike to task for his sordid depiction of Ipswich and “superficial” portrayal of his “own group of friends.”“I have something of the same feeling of reading forbidden trash behind the barn in my youth,” Robertson said in her review of the novel. “And this is hardly the approach one should take to the work of a great writer, a voice of the 20th century that Updike once promised to become.”Updike responded to his “friend” Robertson by denying her “flat, and scandalously blithe, allegations that Tarbox is Ipswich and its characters are my friends.” But he wasn’t fooling anybody.“His friends were used to his habit of pilfering bits and pieces from their lives; if they were annoyed, they kept it to themselves,” Begley writes in his biography of Updike.Others in town, however, complained that the novel made Ipswich seem like “the adultery capital of America, a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah,” Begley added.<h2>Things fell apart</h2>Couples would sell 4.2 million hardcover copies, earning the author an enormous payday, the cover of Time Magazine, and an invitation to the White House from President Lyndon B. Johnson.According to Begley, the Updikes considered moving out of Ipswich shortly after the novel was published but instead bought a home on Labor In Vain Road in 1969.They sold the Polly Dole house to Alexander and Martha Bernhard, a young couple with three kids.“Soon, the Bernhards were part of the gang, and several years later John and Martha launched into an affair that broke up both marriages,” Begley writes.“Once we moved [out of the Polly Dole house], the fact is, things fell apart,” Updike said in Architectural Digest. “The big nut and bolt were holding us together as well.”He left Ipswich in 1973 and married Martha two years later. They first lived in Georgetown before settling down in Beverly Farms. Updike died in 2009. He was 76 years old.Last year, the Ipswich Historical Commission honored Updike’s time in Ipswich with a plaque on the Caldwell Block building on South Main Street.It was in an office directly above the Dolphin Restaurant, now Choate Bridge Pub, on the second floor of the Caldwell building that Updike wrote many of his most celebrated works, including Couples, The Centaur, and Rabbit Redux.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=0uXp30_0vjyT0DR00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=0uXp30_0vjyT0DR00" width="800" height="1107" ></figure><h2>Newsletter</h2>Would you like your week wrapped up? Sign up for our Friday newsletters for a look back and a look ahead. We won't sell (or give away) your email address.The Ipswich Local News is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. We can only operate with your assistance.Instead of making a one-time donation, please consider a recurring contribution. You can select whatever amount you wish.Please consider a monthly donation of $10.But support us at whatever level makes you comfortable. Every little helps.</div></body>

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Own a piece of literary history: Updike’s Ipswich home hits the market

IPSWICH — Named for one its 19th-century owners, Polly Dole, the house on 26 East Street is most famously known as the former residence of author John Updike. And for the first time in nearly 30 years, it just went up for sale. Listed by J. Barrett Realty for...