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John Updike
Updike in 1989
Updike in 1989
Born John Hoyer Updike
(1932-03-18)March 18, 1932
Reading, Pennsylvania, United States
Died January 27, 2009(2009-01-27) (aged 76)
Danvers, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation Novelist, short-story writer, poet, literary critic, artist
Genre Literary realism
Signature
John Updike signature.svg

John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only three writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.

Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His most famous work is his "Rabbit" series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and the novella Rabbit Remembered), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1982) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) were recognized with the Pulitzer Prize.

Updike is considered one of the greatest American fiction writers of his generation. He was widely praised as America's "last true man of letters", with an immense and far-reaching influence on many writers. The excellence of his prose style is acknowledged even by critics skeptical of other aspects of Updike's work.

Early life and education

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Books by John Updike

Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Linda Grace (née Hoyer) and Wesley Russell Updike, and was raised in the nearby small town of Shillington. The family later moved to the unincorporated village of Plowville. His mother's attempts to become a published writer impressed the young Updike. "One of my earliest memories", he later recalled, "is of seeing her at her desk... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in—and come back in." These early years in Berks County, Pennsylvania, would influence the environment of the Rabbit Angstrom stories, as well as many of his early novels and short stories.

Updike graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950 and received a full scholarship to Harvard College. Updike had already received recognition for his writing as a teenager by winning a Scholastic Art & Writing Award, and at Harvard he soon became well known among his classmates as a talented contributor to The Harvard Lampoon, of which he served as president. He graduated summa cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English.

Upon graduation, Updike attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford with the ambition of becoming a cartoonist. After returning to the United States, Updike and his family moved to New York, where he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker. This was the beginning of his professional writing career.

Career as a writer

Updike stayed at The New Yorker as a full staff writer for only two years, writing "Talk of the Town" columns and submitting poetry and short stories to the magazine. Updike and his family relocated to Ipswich, Massachusetts. There, Updike wrote Rabbit, Run (1960), on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and The Centaur (1963), two of his most acclaimed and famous works; the latter won the National Book Award.

Rabbit, Run featured Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a former high school basketball star and middle-class paragon who would become Updike's most enduring and critically acclaimed character. Updike wrote three additional novels about him. Rabbit, Run was featured in Time's All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels.

Updike's career and reputation were nurtured and expanded by his long association with The New Yorker, which published him frequently throughout his career. The Maple short stories, collected in Too Far To Go (1979), reflected the ebb and flow of Updike's first marriage; "Separating" (1974) and "Here Come the Maples" (1976) related to his divorce. They were the basis for the television movie also called Too Far To Go, broadcast by NBC in 1979.

Updike's short stories were collected in several volumes published by Alfred A. Knopf over five decades. In 2013, the Library of America issued a two-volume boxed edition of 186 stories under the title The Collected Stories.

In 1971, Updike published a sequel to Rabbit, Run called Rabbit Redux, his response to the 1960s; Rabbit reflected much of Updike's resentment and hostility towards the social and political changes that beset the United States during that time.

In 1990, he published the last Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Over 500 pages long, the novel is among Updike's most celebrated.

After the publication of Rabbit at Rest, Updike spent the rest of the 1990s and early 2000s publishing novels in a wide range of genres; the work of this period was frequently experimental in nature. These styles included the historical fiction of Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), the magical realism of Brazil (1994), the science fiction of Toward the End of Time (1997), the postmodernism of Gertrude and Claudius (2000), and the experimental fiction of Seek My Face (2002).

In the midst of these, he wrote what was for him a more conventional novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), a historical saga spanning several generations and exploring themes of religion and cinema in America. It is considered the most successful novel of Updike's late career.

In 2003, Updike published The Early Stories, a large collection of his short fiction spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s.

At the end of his life, Updike was working on a novel about St. Paul and early Christianity. Upon his death, The New Yorker published an appreciation by Adam Gopnik of Updike's lifetime association with the magazine, calling him "one of the greatest of all modern writers."

Personal life and death

Updike married Mary E. Pennington, an art student at Radcliffe College, in 1953, while he was still a student at Harvard. She accompanied him to Oxford, England, where he attended art school and where their first child was born in 1955. The couple had three more children together. They divorced in 1974. Updike had seven grandsons.

In 1977 Updike married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, with whom he lived for more than thirty years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. He died of lung cancer at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

In popular culture

  • Updike was featured on the cover of Time twice, on April 26, 1968 and again on October 18, 1982
  • In 2000, Updike appeared as himself in The Simpsons episode Insane Clown Poppy at the Festival of Books
  • The main character portrayed by Eminem in the film 8 Mile (2002) is nicknamed "Rabbit" and has some similarities to Rabbit Angstrom. The film's soundtrack has a song titled "Rabbit Run"
  • Portraits of Updike drawn by the American caricaturist David Levine appeared several times in The New York Review of Books

Awards

Images for kids

  • JOHN UPDIKE CHILDHOOD HOME, SHILLINGTON, BERKS COUNTY

    Boyhood home in Shillington

  • John Updike with Bushes new

    Updike in 1989

  • Updike 29

    Updike delivering the 2008 Jefferson Lecture

See also

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