Author
John Updike
Birth Date
March 18, 1932
(76 Years)
Death Date
January 27, 2009
Associated Country
United States
John Updike was an American novelist, short story writer, and critic, widely regarded as one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania and raised in a small-town environment that later influenced much of his fiction. Updike became known for his precise prose style and his detailed exploration of everyday American life, especially themes of marriage, religion, and personal identity.
He is best known for his “Rabbit” series of novels, beginning with Rabbit, Run (1960), which follows the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom over several decades. Two of the later books in the series, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Updike one of the few writers to receive the prize more than once. In addition to novels, he published numerous short stories, many appearing in The New Yorker, as well as poetry and literary criticism.
Throughout his prolific career, Updike earned widespread recognition, including multiple National Book Awards. He is remembered for his elegant writing style and his ability to capture the complexities of modern life in America with insight and subtlety.
He is best known for his “Rabbit” series of novels, beginning with Rabbit, Run (1960), which follows the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom over several decades. Two of the later books in the series, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Updike one of the few writers to receive the prize more than once. In addition to novels, he published numerous short stories, many appearing in The New Yorker, as well as poetry and literary criticism.
Throughout his prolific career, Updike earned widespread recognition, including multiple National Book Awards. He is remembered for his elegant writing style and his ability to capture the complexities of modern life in America with insight and subtlety.
Books
Olinger Stories 2014
In an interview, Updike once said, "If I had to give anybody one book of me, it would be the Olinger Stories." These stories were originally published in The New Yorker and then in various collections...
“Poetry is leading us,” writes Alice Walker in The World Will Follow Joy. In this luminous collection—a bestseller in hardcover—the beloved writer offers sixty poems to inspire and incite. Penetrating...
S. 2013
S. is the story of Sarah P. Worth, a thoroughly modern spiritual seeker who has become enamored of a Hindu mystic called the Arhat. A native New Englander, she goes west to join his ashram in Arizona,...
Buchanan Dying 2013
To the list of John Updike’s well-intentioned protagonists—Rabbit Angstrom, Richard Maple, Henry Bech—add James Buchanan, the harried fifteenth president of the United States (1857–1861). In what the...
Hugging the Shore 2013
“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea,” writes John Updike in his Foreword to this collection of literary considerations. But the...
Picked-Up Pieces 2013
In John Updike’s second collection of assorted prose he comes into his own as a book reviewer; most of the pieces picked up here were first published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and early ’70s. If...
Odd Jobs 2012
To complement his work as a fiction writer, John Updike accepted any number of odd jobs—book reviews and introductions, speeches and tributes, a “few paragraphs” on baseball or beauty or Borges—and...
Assorted Prose 2012
John Updike’s first collection of nonfiction pieces, published in 1965 when the author was thirty-three, is a diverting and illuminating gambol through midcentury America and the writer’s youth. It...
Self-Consciousness 2012
John Updike’s memoirs consist of six Emersonian essays that together trace the inner shape of the life, up to the age of fifty-five, of a relatively fortunate American male. The author has attempted,...
The Coup 2012
“A leader,” writes Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû, “is one who, out of madness or goodness, takes upon himself the woe of a people. There are few men so foolish.” Colonel Ellelloû has four wives, a...
The Poorhouse Fair 2012
The hero of John Updike’s first novel, published when the author was twenty-six, is ninety-four-year-old John Hook, a dying man who yet refuses to be dominated. His world is a poorhouse—a county home...
My Father's Tears 2010
John Updike mingles narratives of Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel: “Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full...
The Maples Stories 2009
In 1956, Updike published a story, “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these...
More than three decades have passed since the events described in John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick.
The three divorcées—Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie—have left town, remarried, and become widows....
Due Considerations 2008
Here Updike considers many books, some in introductions—to such classics as Walden, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Mabinogion—and many more in reviews, usually for The New Yorker. Ralph Waldo Emerson...
Terrorist 2007
The terrorist of John Updike’s title is eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the son of an Irish American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three. Devoted to Allah and to...
Villages 2005
In between these two settlements comes Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Owen, an early computer programmer, founds with a partner, Ed Mervine, the successful firm of E-O Data, which is housed in an...
The Early Stories 2004
The Early Stories: 1953–1975 gathers a wide selection of John Updike’s short fiction from the first decades of his career, offering a detailed portrait of American life in the mid-20th century. Set in...
Of the Farm 2004
In this short novel, Joey Robinson, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker, describes a visit he makes, with his second wife and eleven-year-old stepson, to the Pennsylvania farm where he grew up and where...
Seek My Face 2002
On a day that contains much conversation and some rain, the seventy-eight-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful life has been Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway,...
Gertrude and Claudius are the “villains” of Hamlet: he the killer of Hamlet’s father and usurper of the Danish throne; she his lusty consort, who marries Claudius before her late husband’s body is...
Bech at Bay 1999
In this, the final volume in John Updike’s mock-heroic trilogy about the Jewish American writer Henry Bech, our hero is older but scarcely wiser. Now in his seventies, he remains competitive,...
Set in the near future of 2020, this disconcerting philosophical fantasy depicts an America devastated by a war with China that has left its populace decimated, its government a shambles, and its...
Bech Is Back 1998
In this follow-up to Bech: A Book, Henry Bech, the priapic, peripatetic, and unproductive Jewish American novelist, returns with seven more chapters from his mock-heroic life. He turns fifty in a...
Bech: A Book 1998
The Jewish American novelist Henry Bech—procrastinating, libidinous, and tart-tongued, his reputation growing while his powers decline—made his first appearance in 1965, in John Updike’s “The...
In the Beauty of the Lilies begins in 1910 and traces God’s relation to four generations of American seekers, beginning with Clarence Wilmot, a clergyman in Paterson, New Jersey. He loses his faith...
Marry Me 1996
A diadem of five symmetrical chapters describes the course of their affair as it flickers off and on, and as their spouses react, in a tentative late-summer atmosphere of almost-last chances. For this...
Trust Me 1996
The theme of trust, betrayed or fulfilled, runs through this collection of short stories: Parents lead children into peril, husbands abandon wives, wives manipulate husbands, and time undermines all....
When historian Alfred “Alf” Clayton is invited by an academic journal to record his impressions of the Gerald R. Ford Administration (1974–77), he recalls not the political events of the time but...
A Month of Sundays 1996
At a desert retreat dedicated to rest, recreation, and spiritual renewal, this fortyish serial fornicator is required to keep a journal whose thirty-one weekly entries constitute the book you now hold...
Roger's Version 1996
As Roger Lambert tells it, he, a middle-aged professor of divinity, is buttonholed in his office by Dale Kohler, an earnest young computer scientist who believes that quantifiable evidence of God’s...
The Centaur 1996
The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the...
Rabbit Redux 1996
Rabbit Angstrom, Book 2
In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy...
Couples 1996
One of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a book that, when it debuted, scandalized the public with prose pictures of the way people live, and that today provides an engrossing...
Toward the end of the Vietnam era, in a snug little Rhode Island seacoast town, wonderful powers have descended upon Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie, bewitching divorcées with sudden access to all that is...
Rabbit, Run 1996
Rabbit Angstrom, Book 1
Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star...
Brazil 1996
They meet by chance on Copacabana Beach: Tristao Raposo, a poor black teen surviving day to day on street smarts and the hustle, and Isabel Leme, an upper-class white girl, treated like a pampered...
The Afterlife 1996
To the hero of the title story of this collection, all of England has the glow of an afterlife: “A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig . . . each reed of thatch, each...
Rabbit At Rest 1990
Rabbit Angstrom, Book 4
Rabbit’s son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in midlife to become a working girl.
As, through the winter,...
Problems 1985
In this midcareer collection of twenty-three short stories, John Updike tackles such problems as separation, divorce, and remarriage, parents and children, guns and prostitution, leprosy, swooning,...
Rabbit Is Rich 1981
Rabbit Angstrom, Book 3
The hero of John Updike's *Rabbit, Run* (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in *Rabbit Redux* (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of...