September 10, 1999

Do Academic Giants Still Walk the Earth?

By MARK EDELMAN BOREN

John Updike materialized last November at a seminar on his work at Lehigh University and announced to the awestruck students, "I must seem like a dinosaur. ... You study it, but you don't expect it to show up in your classroom." Looking like some antediluvian beast in penny loafers, the 66-year-old author boldly claimed for himself a term that many academics fear will be publicly affixed to them. The label "dinosaur" is one of the worst insults a scholar can