The New York Times, June 20, 2010

In the mid-1960s, when John Updike began giving selected papers to the Houghton Library at Harvard University, they were cataloged and, for the most part, made available to researchers. But after an amendment to the tax law in 1969 eliminated the sizable deductions authors reaped from such donations, Updike, though he continued to deposit papers, did so only for warehousing purposes. He retained ownership of this material and let very few look at it. The calculation was proprietary. His literary cosmos was still expanding, and he was loath to expose its workings.