John Updike's early career was like an idealized fantasy. He moved almost directly from Harvard to a position as a contributing writer/editor at The New Yorker, then spent the '50s and '60s filing regular dispatches from his New England home, recording his observations about contemporary life while raising a family and living in the thick of the middle class. The Early Stories covers the bulk of the short fiction Updike wrote between 1954 and 1975, offering more than 100 pieces that run the gamut from thinly veiled memoir to gawky character studies to miniature morality plays. The quality varies wildly, which isn't surprising given the way Updike ground these stories out over 20 years, while simultaneously penning novels, book reviews, poems, and reportage. But even among the stories that contain little more than the ghost of an idea, Updike still catches moments and holds them, wriggling with life, for closer inspection. In the process, he elevates the irritating habits of coworkers, the comforts and constraints of home, and the gulf between husbands and wives into passages of stark truth. The Early Stories is noteworthy for compiling Updike's long-out-of-print "Olinger Stories" cycle, which fictionalizes his memories of growing up on a farm outside a small Pennsylvania town. Like much of Updike's early work, the Olinger pieces are strongest when they dredge up the specifics of, for example, public-school classrooms during a snowfall, and less potent when Updike adds too many distancing layers in attempt to be universal. In that regard, one of The Early Stories' strongest entries is 1963's "The Christian Roommates," which combines detailed reminiscences of the pressures of being a freshman at Harvard with a typically Updike-esque story of how people's efforts at civility often drive a deeper wedge between them. Given the immediacy of Updike's descriptions of the Harvard campus in midwinter, or his passing observations in other stories about Nikita Khrushchev's visit to America or the electability of Tennessee senator Al Gore (the elder), it's almost too bad that he didn't write more straight non-fiction in his formative years. But it's just as well that he took the position he did, leading the way for a generation of civilized, literate writers, all sketching their times in the words that popped into their heads that week, rather than waiting for perfect inspiration.