I hid under John Updike's dining room table one afternoon.

The house he grew up in Shillington, Pa., is occupied now by a small design firm, or it was 10 years ago. It's not a museum, there's no plaque on the wall, there isn't a sign that leads you there, but the people who work in the mostly unaltered home are used to the occasional enthusiast. They let me in with a smile and went about their suburban business. As the printers churned and the computers pinged, I wandered through the tiny house.

About the size of a two-and-a-half-story unit in Bloomfield. A little narrower as farm town places can be. Low ceilings. A staircase that doubled down into the kitchen in the rear. The cherry tree he used to stare at from his bedroom still growing outside the parlor window. The cheap stained glass that for him had made molten dreams on the far wall below, remained.

From this place was born one of the great imaginations of American literature. Harnessed to a powerful work ethic, that imagination brought forth an enormous body of work, which has been widely celebrated since Mr. Updike's death last week at the age of 76.

But that house in Eastern Pennsylvania: It was the most unimpressive shack I'd ever been in. It was cramped, awkward, ungainly. It was poor. If you asked someone, make me a literary giant's house, this would not be the result.

And then I thought to myself: God, do we still buy into that garbage? That the muse only visits those born with a vista, that art needs to come out of a garden. As if comfort helps makes beauty or truth.

I thought of the stoops August Wilson sat on as child, the diner and the barber shop he started putting down his dreams in. I thought of Thomas Bell scribbling out his epic of the Mon Valley in rooms we'd hesitate to enter. I thought of Lewis Hine and Gene Smith swimming through squalor and dirt to tell us these people too have a story to tell, to hear.

And here was John Updike, the high prince of American Letters, the stylish voice of middle-class America, born out of about the most undistinguished corner of Anywhere, USA one could call forth.

If I could take every student I've ever taught and place them in his home, put them on Wilson's stoop, walk them through Bell's Braddock, if I could do that and say again and again: "Where you come from doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be a pretty picture. It's what you do with what you see that is everything."

It's the grist of your self that makes a good novel, not the subject. You can write garbage about the Kennedy assassination and poetry about a skating rink. You can take a bad picture of Yosemite and you can make a masterpiece out of a bell pepper, or a steelworker covered in dirt.

I think that's Pittsburgh's curse. We're always looking to make someone else's idea of a masterpiece when the sometimes ugly truth of what we are is where the gold lies.

I crouched down when no one was looking and fit myself under John Updike's childhood table.

I'd read that this was the place he first remembered thinking, I want to talk about this, I want to put this down, this feeling of being small, of being young, of the shape of my parents' home and the light dancing on the far wall.

I sat down there trying to feel it, what was it like to see what a great writer had seen, to be like him, wondering where his dreams had gone, and when I closed my eyes, where I ended up was Pittsburgh.