The house as Updike knew it.

"When I was born, my parents and my mother’s parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood," wrote John Updike. "This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age, was, in a sense, me." Updike might now be gone, but the dogwood tree is still outside his boyhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and the house where the author spent his first 13 years is now for sale on Ebay. It now has wall-to-wall carpeting and an addition, and it appears to have been converted into office space. Bidding starts at $249,000. Nobody has bid on it yet.

One author Mr. Wylie never succeeded in signing, despite wanting to very badly, was John Updike, who died last January at the age of 76. By that time, Mr. Wylie had been in pursuit of Updike for more than a decade, but each time he made his pitch, the agent said, the author "politely declined."

After Updike's death, the situation changed, as his widow, Martha, realized she would need an expert to come in and sort out who owns what of her late husband's work, which rights are ripe for reversion and which contracts need to be renegotiated. Her decision to hire Mr. Wylie followed consultations with lawyer Jennifer Snyder Jennifer Snyder of the Boston firm WilmerHale, who was brought on to handle administration of the Estate after the author's death.

The funny thing about Mr. Wylie's failure to secure the Updike account while the author was still alive was that he wasn't even competing with anyone for the prize: Updike, by choice, did not have an agent. Instead, he preferred to deal directly with Knopf, his publisher since the late 1950s, when Pat Knopf brought him over from HarperCollins and published his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair. According to his lifelong editor, Judith Jones, Knopf functioned both as Updike's publisher and his representation-- an unusual arrangement even before publishing turned into a corporate business. Not having a proper agent, Ms. Jones said, "was just part of who he was."

"He had old-fashioned values, if you know what I mean," said Ms. Jones, who has been with Knopf for more than 50 years. "For him it was perfect: We did the work of an agent for him and did it extraordinarily well, particularly in the field of foreign rights, and it didn't cost him anything!"

Over the course of his career, Updike would publish an astonishing 60 books through Knopf, each one apparently the result of a friendly discussion between him and the publisher. Mr. Wylie's task now is to sit down with the contracts that came out of those discussions and determine what they leave him to work with.

"We acquire copies of all contracts and a few years of royalty statements, analyze them, place them in our database," Mr. Wylie said in an email, "and make recommendations, territory by territory, based on what we find."

And what might that be? Potentially, not very much! According to Knopf's executive director of publicity, Paul Bogaards, most of Updike's books are still in print in the U.S., meaning Knopf still controls those rights and will continue to do so until they revert back to the estate. And if Knopf's celebrated director of international rights, Carole Janeway, has been diligent about managing Updike's foreign contracts, Mr. Wylie could find himself staring into an empty tomb.

"I'm rather puzzled by what's in it for an agent," said Ms. Jones, who is a co-executor of the Estate with Mrs. Updike. "But, clearly it's something Andrew Wylie has wanted for a long time, to have John Updike as one of his authors. And he'll clearly do what he can do to explore every possibility."

His track record suggests he will go about this work, let's say, not without energy. His client list contains more than 70 estates, including those of Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow and Jorge Luis Borges. This fall, he added the J.G. Ballard Estate and the W.H. Auden Estate.

One of the first estates Mr. Wylie ever represented, that of Italo Calvino, provides an instructive illustration of the muscle the agent is capable of flexing. In that case, Mr. Wylie succeeded in getting the late author's longtime Italian publisher, Einaudi, to revert the rights to all of Calvino's titles, and with the support of the author's widow resold them, along with a bundle of unpublished work, to a different house.

Which is to say that if there are Updike rights out in the world that can be shaken loose-be they for movies, translations, e-books or paperbacks-Mr. Wylie will find them. As he put it to The Times of London in July 2008, this is his specialty. "It's like walking into a house that hasn't been cleaned in a decade," Mr. Wylie said then. "We strip the bed, put on new sheets, fluff up the pillows, clean the kitchen-and suddenly the house increases in value."

Though Mr. Wylie said it is too early to speak at length about future plans, he did say a collection of Updike's essays would be delivered to Knopf this fall. And Max Rudin, the publisher of the Library of America series, said he is in talks with Mr. Wylie and the estate about bringing out Library of America editions of Updike's work at some point in the future-something the author was very eager to do while he was alive but couldn't because such editions would compete directly with Knopf's Everyman's Library series. Two unpublished early novels, entitled Home and Go Away, do exist in an archive at Harvard, but according to Mr. Wylie they are "not for publication."

lneyfakh@observer.com

Hundreds gathered last night under the shimmering saucer dome of the New York Public Library’s Celeste Bartos Forum to remember John Updike. The lights went down at 7 p.m., and a moment later the screen onstage flickered awake to show the late author seated three years ago in the very same room, cheerfully discussing his writing with former New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg.

“I don’t really do much else but write,” Updike said, having established that he'd just published something like his 60th book. 

When the video ended, a photograph in which Updike's features make him appear even friendlier than usual appeared in its place and remained there for the rest of the evening. It was hard to look at anything else, even as the procession of giants on the bill appeared onstage to read from Updike’s work and tell tender stories. 

Knopf chairman Sonny Mehta declared with gratitude at the opening of the program that Updike was “an author with the heart of a publisher,” who “cared about the process and the mechanics of making a book” right down to the fonts, the trim size and the paper stock.

He was a professional writer, Mr. Mehta said: “It was his trade, and he was a master of that trade.”

New Yorker editor David Remnick spoke humbly about what Updike meant to the magazine that published him all his life (“We did little for him—so little needed doing—but he did everything for us”) and warned readers that the poetry he put down on paper in the last weeks of his life contained some of the most “determined, stubborn, beautiful death-bed lines we possess.”

Speaking last (immediately following ZZ Packer's reading of a particularly dark excerpt from Rabbit, Run), Updike’s son David told the audience that his father at the time of his death was reading Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, in an effort, he said, to “catch up on history he was about to miss.”

A montage of photographs followed, ending with a thrilling color shot of Updike standing tall on a patch of bright green grass, a blue sweater peeking out from his collar and his right arm extended theatrically and joyously into the air.

6:30 p.m. Authors Anthony "Ace" Bourke and John Randal will discuss "Christian," the lion they raised and introduced into the wild, while screening a YouTube video of their reunion. In Linder Theater at the American Museum of Natural History.

6:30 p.m. An Illustrated talk about the history of the Garment Center and popular culture is presented at C.U.N.Y. Graduate Center, Elebash Recital Hall, 365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street.

7 p.m. New Yorker editor David Remnick pays tribute to writer John Updike. ZZ Packer, Adam Gopnik, Roger Angell. Ann Goldstein and Charles McGrath will join Mr. Remnick to share stories and excerpts from Mr. Updike's work. At Celeste Bartos Forum, N.Y.P.L., Fifth Avenue and West 42nd Street. Tickets are $25.

7 p.m. "Educators" explore factors linking wine, chocolate and sex at a women's only seminar. In Good Company, 16 West 23rd Street.

7:30 p.m. Saks CEO Steve Sadove is honored by the Fashion Institute of Technology at benefit gala featuring a host of fashionistas, Cipriani 42nd Street, 110 East 42nd Street.

7:30 p.m. The Latin American Cultural Center of Queens hosts the Quintet of the Americas; Salvation Army Center of Jackson Heights, 86-07 35th Avenue.

8 p.m. Edward Albee and Marian Seldes present a reading of Albee's play Counting the Ways at Lotos Club, 5 East 69th Street.

8 p.m. The Big Art Group presents SOS, "a hallucinatory theatrical happening" who's most recent piece (SOS)  is "an action media performance exploring futureness, survivalism, revolutionary movements and contemporary rituals, the performance examines the notion of sacrifice to make space for a new beginning." At the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street; tickets are $15.

Phew! We survived St. Patrick’s Day without being run over by a beer-swilling, laid-off trader from Hoboken! (We went there once in our early 20s to celebrate this “holiday” and weren’t quite right for years …) Who would guess that St. Patrick was actually an upstanding Christian missionary and not the inventor of onion rings? Not that guests at Film Forum’s premiere of Valentino: The Last Emperor are really the St. Patty’s Day types anyway. Directed by Vanity Fair editor Matt Tyrnauer, this much-publicized film follows retired Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani, who is known for dressing women such as Jackie Kennedy in classy evening gowns and, more importantly, for traveling the world with six pugs. That’s one … two … three … four … five … six! Pugs!

[Valentino: The Last Emperor at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, www.filmforum.org]

Thursday, March 19

Fleetwood Mac! Is here! New York! Playing Madison Square Garden! Meaning little else about today matters! … Nonetheless, we should probably mention that friends and colleagues of the late John Updike host a gathering at the New York Public Library to pay tribute to a man so scarily productive that he’ll publish three books posthumously. Spooky! Expect New Yorker editor in chief David Remnick, former New Yorker editor Chip McGrath (whose spawn Ben currently toils at the magazine) and New Yorker scribes Adam Gopnik and Roger Angell, not to mention several folks who do not work at Condé Nast, such as Knopf chief Sonny Mehta. And if this doesn’t give you your fill of tweed and lilac-scented cashmere socks, try the Lotos Club, where East Hampton arts hub LongHouse Reserve is hosting a benefit featuring playwright Edward Albee—you know, the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? guy—and Tony winner Marian Seldes, who will stage a dramatic reading of Mr. Albee’s play Counting the Ways. Meanwhile, showing complete disregard for literature is shoe designer–to–the–starlets Brian Atwood, who hosts a cocktail party with nubile young things with huge bony feet such as Byrdie Bell (somehow we suspect that if our parents had named us Byrdie, everything would’ve been very different) and Julia Restoin-Roitfeld, sultry spawn of fur-hugging French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld. The dubious reason for this gathering is the publication of a new doorstop of photographs by Tony Duran featuring Thomas Crown Affair babe Rene Russo wearing Mr. Atwood’s shoes. Has anyone told these nice people we’re in a recession?!

[Fleetwood Mac at Madison Square Garden, 8 p.m., www.ticketmaster.com; John Updike tribute, New York Public Library, Celeste Bartos Forum, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, 7 p.m.; LongHouse Reserve Spring Benefit, Lotos Club, 5 East 66th Street, 6:30 p.m., 631-329-3568; Brian Atwood cocktail party, OpenHouse Gallery, 201 Mulberry Street, 8 p.m.]

Friday, March 20

New York ain’t lonely, honey! There’s a club for everyone around here! Swingers? Check. Foot fetishists? Check. Hipster bike jousters? Check. Dadaists? Check mate! “It initially came to be during the beginning of World War I, and in this time when we’re involved in not only two wars but have the economic Pearl Harbor, as Warren Buffett put it, we need to dig down and find a new way of seeing things, and Dada has always been about that,” said Kat Georges, organizer of the Madcap Dada Poetry Salon at the Cornelia Street Café tonight. “Dada itself claims that it never existed. We’re not an organization; we’re just hosting this event and enjoying it.” Of course, the dress code is somewhat open. “You can cross-dress, undress …” said Ms. Georges. “The idea is to be striking and bold and creative. Dada poet Mina Loy used to dress for masquerade balls wearing lampshades as her hat.” (We can see it on Galliano’s runway now!) And in other news of the artsy set (sigh, we used to think we were “artsy,” but then we discovered Stam bags …), a group called Art Battles stages an Iron Chef–like art competition at Le Poisson Rouge, featuring four brave artists creating visual art live to the soothing sounds of someone called DJ Jus Ske. (Can’t help you here; ask your unpaid and very surly intern.)

[Madcap Dada Poetry Salon, Cornelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia Street, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., http://threeroomspress.blogspot.com; Art Battles at Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, 8 or 11 p.m., www.artbattles.com]

Saturday, March 21

Note to New York newbies: Rao’s isn’t just an expensive marinara sauce you buy at Whole Foods; it’s also an Italian eatery in Harlem full of  mobsters and celebrities! And since you’ll never get a reservation there (unless you happen to be sleeping with Robert De Niro, in which case, you win, bang, bang), why not sample its distinctly Goodfellas charm at the James Beard House, where a charity dinner promises cameos by the Pellegrino family, owners of the joint, not to mention the Italian home-cooking of Carla Pellegrino, whom we’re told will be whipping up fontina-and-prosciutto-stuffed veal loin with porcini ragu and fried polenta, among other house specialties. “I met the Pellegrinos in Las Vegas about two years ago, when they opened Rao’s at Caesar’s Palace,” said Beard honcho Susan Ungaro, adding that she’s expecting “the whole family, Frank Jr. and Sr., Carla, Ron Straci, and then the bartender, Nick the Vest. He has over 350 vests.”  Sounds like a good idea not to send anything back.

[James Beard Foundation presents “A Night at Rao’s,” James Beard House, 167 West 12th Street, 7 p.m., 212-627-2308]

Sunday, March 22

If your boyfriend quotes regularly from Superbad, toss him a clean T-shirt and drag him to see director Greg Mottola appearing at his own day-long Museum of the Moving Image retrospective alongside actors in his films, among them Liev Schreiber, who will attend a screening of The Daytrippers (1996), and Kevin Corrigan, a vet of both Superbad and Pineapple Express … meaning we have no idea who he is, but our skinny musician might!

[Superday with Greg Mottola, DGA Theater, 110 West 57th Street, 2 p.m. on; see http://movingimage.us for schedule]

Monday, March 23

On the one hand, we have the New York City Ballet—beloved of socialites everywhere—and on the other, we have the Ballet Hispanico, described by Marie-Louise Stegall, its director of development, as “modern with Latin flavor … we appear quite frequently with live bands. They are absolutely gorgeous, I have to say, our dancers … Everything is really theatrical in flavor.” The flavors will be hot tonight as SoHo House hosts a benefit featuring a “dance display” by company members, who will be gyrating in Zac Posen. (“We are hoping he’s going to be there,” noted Ms. Stegall.) It’s almost enough to make a gal briefly consider re-committing to Pilates before kicking back blueberry mojitos withLatin dance enthusiasts Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Julia Dimon (daughter of beleaguered Jamie) and Grace Gummer, daughter of La Streep. Meanwhile, the literati stage a “Literary Showdown” to flaunt their knowledge of the English canon. (May take more than that to woo those hard-bodied hedge fund widows, fellas!) The authors’ team includes famed book jacket designer Chip Kidd; author A. J. Jacobs in trousers so tight you can just call him “Lefty”; and ubiquitous joiner Jonathan Lethem. They’ll compete against teams of editors and agents hailing from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Ballantine, Endeavor and more. (This all feels very much like the debate team trying to upstage the lacrosse players after the lacrosse players blew the biggest game of the season … and later burned down the school.)

[Junior Society of the Ballet Hispanico’s Dance Into Fashion Benefit, SoHo House, 29-35 Ninth Avenue, 8 p.m.; Literary Showdown to celebrate Slice literary magazine, Dixon Place, 161 Chrystie Street, 6:30 p.m.]

Tuesday, March 24

Find those little white shoes you used to wear to jazz class, pair them with a dingy vintage fur from their grandma’s closet and slog out to see British Indie rockers Bloc Party perform at Terminal 5. Rock stars being quite the Internet savants these days, we convinced one member of the band to email us! “My favorite show in New York was the Brooklyn pool show,” said Russell Lissack, guitarist, referring. “It was a glorious, sunny day and we got to have a big water fight in the pool before the show. Then we played what I think was our biggest show ever in New York.”

[Bloc Party at Terminal 5, 610 West 56th Street, 8 p.m., sold out]

Wednesday, March 25

Isn’t it romantic? Sarah Dunn reads from her latest novel, Secrets to Happiness, about angst-ridden New Yorkers chasing their own fluffy tails in a search for romantic bliss, wedded or otherwise, at the Barnes & Noble in the West Village. Bonus dirty excerpt! “I’m serious,” said Jack. “I want a warm woman. Is that too much to ask for?” “No, see, but I don’t think that’s all you want,” said Holly. “I think you want a woman who’s stylish and articulate and funny and smart, who has a real career, who keeps up with her New York City grooming routine and goes to the gym and has a flat stomach and who also happens to be an incredibly warm and nurturing individual. And maybe all that doesn’t fit together so well.”

[Sarah Dunn at Barnes & Noble at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, 7:30 p.m.]

It starts with the ragtag pioneers, moving in with their funky friends and their bohemian pursuits, seeking life on the cheap in some desolate space. Then comes the progression: artists give way to creative professionals, lofts give way to loft-style co-ops, expensive cheese stores give way to more expensive cheese stores. The neighborhood has arrived; there it goes.

Today, we look around and learn that, according to Technorati's 2008 State of the Blogosphere (that word brings back such fond memories!) the Web indexing site now keeps track of 133 million blogs. For some perspective, imagine the entire population of Canada sharing its thoughts on politics, pop culture, and kittens. Now add in France. And Belgium. And New York. And most of Texas.

To paraphrase The Bard: Nobody goes to the blogosphere anymore: It's too crowded.

Today, Media Mob is no more. Make no mistake, observer.com will continue to bring readers breaking media news and analysis from our brilliant, tireless, attractive, and humble media team, but these stories will no longer exist under the old rubric. We'll be breaking our long-practiced omertà in favor of sharing our news breaks and takes via the main Observer homepage.

Media Mob is dead; Long Live Media Mob.

By way of eulogy, in no particular order and with no bias towards author or medium, here are some of Media Mob's 'greatest hits' (and, with that, all mafia puns get whacked once and for all):

- Juicy Bits Surfacing in Rather Case: In 2004, CBS Considered Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter Independent Panel

- For an Airplane, a Tragedy; For a Writer, an Opportunity

- Empty Nast Syndrome: Condé Nast Cutting Five Percent of All Magazine Staffs; Future of Men's Vogue In Doubt

- Gerry Howard on Discovering, Editing, and Hatching David Foster Wallace: 'He Was the First Person Who Ever Called Me "Mister"'

- Pure Imagination: In Which a Boy From Alabama Talks About New York, The Times Book Review, and the Future of Fiction

- Radar Shutting Down (Again)

- It Takes a Nation of Nerds to Make Jimmy Fallon a Late Night Host

- Inside the Fox News Green Room in Denver, Close Quarters, Big Stars, and Observer Clumsiness

- Observer Softball Report: What If 9-0 Never Happened?

- The New York Sun Folds

- A Look Back: The Daily Beast's First 100 Hours

- At Jack McWethy Memorial, the Ghost of a Famous Grin

- Breaking: 58-Year-Old Woman Not 25; Or 30; Or 40

- John Updike Dies at 76

- Doomsday in L.A.: The L.A. Times Cuts 150 Newsroom Jobs

- Maureen Dowd: The Mirror Has Two Faces

- Only Connect: Silicon Alley Insider Honors Silicon Alley 100

- Longtime Times Book Review Senior Editor Dwight Garner to Join Kakutani and Maslin in Daily Paper

Speaking from his home in London, Mr. Begley said Mr. Duggan first approached him about doing a book about six months ago, but that at the time he didn't have any great ideas for what that book might be. Mr. Duggan got in touch again the day after Mr. Begley's Updike obituary ran in The Observer, and plans for this biography were hatched shortly thereafter.

Mr. Begley said his first contact with Updike came when he was a toddler, as a result of his father, the novelist Louis Begley, who graduated from the English department at Harvard with him in 1954.

Later, when he was 35-years-old, Mr. Begley interviewed Updike for a profile in the magazine Mirabella.

"He was doing a reading in a college town in Wisconsin, and I spent two days following him around," Mr. Begley said. "It was when Brazil came out, and I think I did it in lieu of reviewing the book, because it wasn’t one of his best. I thought it’d be more fun to talk about him than to talk about the book."

Mr. Begley interviewed Updike again in the fall of 2003 for an Observer profile. Afterward, Updike gave him a copy of the book Self-Consciousness, inscribed with a tender dedication: "For Adam Begley, the interviewer who makes me happy. Best wishes, of course, John Updike."

“Like Bellow, his only equal in this, Updike is a master of effortless motion—between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalization, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God’s-eye view.”

A FEW OF my favorite passages from the flood of eulogies:

“I love Updike’s writing so much I can barely read it. My eye falls on a sentence. My mood has already improved. I slam the book shut. Another sentence may do me in. Still, I read on, and my mood goes vaulting upward yet again. This isn’t reading; this is drinking. I read him in order to become ebullient. Those extra words he plunks into his sentences, the unusual images, the way that everything seems to shimmer, his habit of dissolving each new visible thing into microscopic radiant glints of God knows what—every last over-the-top element of Updike’s prose has the effect of lighting me up.” —Paul Berman

“Updike was congenitally unembarrassable and we are the beneficiaries of that. He took the novel onto another plane of intimacy: he took us beyond the bedroom and into the bathroom. It’s as if nothing human seemed closed to his eye.” —Martin Amis

“Even when his essays included a harsh criticism, he politely coiled it, tucked it inside, part snake, part rose, and the reader would feel the bite sprung silkily only at the end—in a balletic allegiance to both generosity and candor.” —Lorrie Moore

“Updike’s example seemed the model of a real writer’s life, in that this was an existence spent not in talking about writing, promising to write, boasting of having written or telling other people how they should write, but simply in the act of writing, every day, for decades.” —Zadie Smith

“Now and then he would turn up at the office, startling me once again with his height and his tweeds, that major nose, and his bright eyes and up-bent smile; he spoke in a light half whisper and, near the end of each visit, somehow withdrew a little, growing more private and less visible even before he turned away. The fadeaway, as I came to think of it, may have had to do with his exile from his own writing that day, while travelling; the spacious writing part of him was held to one side when not engaged, kept ready for its engrossing daily stint back home.” —Roger Angell

AND HERE—one last fadeaway—is the first paragraph of an interview Updike gave just three months ago (the interviewer is the eminent Peter Conrad):

“‘Lately,’ said John Updike, ‘I’ve been feeling not so much a wish to die as a wish that being alive didn’t generate so many demands.’ Sitting across from Updike in a Boston hotel suite with my notebook open, I was the demand, and I have to say that he looked equal to it: now 76, with a wintry shock of white hair, his eyes gleamed in his angular, beveled face, and his mouth curved in wry amusement. ‘You write a book,’ he went on, ‘and that generates demands, like this interview—though of course I’m sure it will be perfectly delightful!’”

Updike was right, as usual: The interview is a delight, Updike as the polished old pro, charming, sly, gracious, generously intent on the task at hand.

In the book Updike in Cincinnati (Ohio University Press, 2007), the author explains how he came to appear on the show in 2000:

Skip ahead to the 5:50 mark in this video to see if Mr. Updike pulled it off.

Leon Neyfakh wonders Why Do Young Male Writers Love Icky, Tough Guy Deadbeats?

Felix Gillette writes about CBS News producer Susan Zirinsky, the inspiration for Holly Hunter's Jane Craig in Broadcast News.

Plus: Joel Lovell, GQ's Anti-Jim Cramer... Andrea Mitchell: Gay Icon... The Hipster Rent Boys of New York.