The stacks at Harvard’s Widener Library are, I have come to believe, the best place to hide if you want to spend an afternoon reading uninterrupted but not alone. Widener has that rare charm conferred on a place only once it has been sufficiently drenched in history and filled with books—the most famous of which is certainly Harvard’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible, one of 48 still in existence. But Harvard is also home to a lesser-known literary artifact, stashed away in the school’s repository for rare books and manuscripts: an empty bag of Keystone Snacks corn chips that once belonged to John Updike.

Updike was not a hoarder the way some of the characters in his novels are (in Rabbit, Run, the Angstrom apartment is a “continual crisscrossing mess”). But he was still a collector of sorts, always in service of writerly research either directly (as with the bag of chips, part of the work that went into his Rabbit tetralogy) or indirectly (as with the various women he took to bed who were not his wife). Either way, the collecting showed up in the writing.

Selected Letters of John Updike, an immense new compendium of the American novelist’s personal correspondence spanning nearly seven decades, from the early 1940s to his death, in 2009, underscores the vanishingly short distance between Updike’s writing life and his actual life. Not that you need to read his private letters to see that—anyone who read Couples, or followed the very New England scandal it created, will readily understand that Updike wasn’t a writer who left any literary fruit unsqueezed. “An empty book is a greedy thing,” he once said in an interview. “You wind up using everything you know.”

Still, in the aggregate, Updike’s letters could constitute the outline for a never-published Updike novel. The writing is variously winking, earnest, desperate, oversexed, and ambitious.

Too many famous names flitter in and out of Selected Letters to list them all, but here is a small sampling: John Cheever, Erica Jong, Roger Angell, Norman Mailer, Italo Calvino, George Plimpton, Karl Shapiro, Lorrie Moore, Cynthia Ozick, Tina Brown, Kurt V