Irony vs. Mammon

View from Castle Hill in Ipswich, Mass., one of the North Shore towns that John Updike called home

“I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don’t get hay fever in New England either.”

— John Updike ( 1932-2009), famed novelist and long-time resident of the Massachusetts North Shore, in the Observer of London, 1979