“Flight” was originally published in the August 22, 1959, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962) and is currently most readily available in John Updike: The Collected Stories (Library of America).

The first assignment I always give a new class is to come in with a description of “Home.” I don't give any suggestions beyond that, and the results vary wildly. One student gave a geographical description of his home state complete with state bird and flower and motto; another said that when he thought of home he thought of incense and cat shit (certainly an answer that prompted many questions) and another, a favorite, was the description of the shelf beneath the register in a Chinese restaurant where he napped as his parents and various relatives hustled about making a living. The exercise is designed to make students think about those early years, the details about the people and place that serves as backdrop to those earliest emotional reactions to the world. Then I assign John Updike's story “Flight” because I think it is a perfect example of all the memories and feelings the exercise was attempting to spark.

In an interview with Charles Thomas Samuels in Writers at Work, Updike said: “I suppose there's no avoiding it—my adolescence seemed interesting to me. In a sense my mother and father, considerable actors both, were dramatizing my youth as I was having it so that I arrived as an adult with some burden of material already half formed.” Updike then proceeds to discuss the theme of “flight or escape or loss, the way we flee from the past, a sense of guilt,” and he goes further to recount the final scene in the story “Flight”: