John Updike

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John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932-2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic.

During his career, Updike, one of only three writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner). Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker beginning in 1954.

He also contributed to The New York Review of Books.

His most well-known work is his book "Rabbit" series (the novels Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest) and the novella Rabbit Remembered), which chronicles Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's life over the course of many decades, from youth to death.

Both Rabbit Is Rich (1982) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) were honoured with the Pulitzer Prize. Updike was known for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific output – he wrote on average a year.

Updike's fiction featured characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and are often vulnerable to issues related to faith, family commitments, and marital infidelity."

His work has received swarms of critical attention and laud, and he is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's best American writers of his time.

Updike's soaring prose style has a rich, unusual, and occasionally arcane vocabulary as seen through the eyes of "a young, adamant authorship" who celebrates the physical world while still fully in the realist tradition.

He referred to his style as an effort to "give the mundane its due."

Early life and education

Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Linda Grace (née Hoyer) and Wesley Russell Updike), and he was raised in the nearby small town of Shillington. The family then migrated to Plowville, which was unincorporated. The young Updike was captivated by his mother's efforts to become a published writer. "One of my earliest memories," he later recalled, "is of her sitting at her desk." The writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, and the boxes of clean paper were all admired by me. I also remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in—and come back in."

The Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy's environment, as well as several of his early books and short stories, will be influenced by his early years in Berks County, Pennsylvania. In 1950, Updike graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president, as the roommate of Christopher Lasch during their first year. Updike was already recognized as a young writer by winning a Scholastic Art & Writing Award, and as a result of his work at Harvard, he became a respected and prolific contributor to The Harvard Lampoon, of which he was president. Robert Chapman, the director of Harvard's Loeb Drama Center, studied with dramatist Robert Chapman. He earned his Phi Beta Kappa in 1954 with a degree in English, and was named to Phi Beta Kappa.

Updike attracted the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford as a student, with the intention of becoming a cartoonist. Updike and his family immigrated to New York, where he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker. This was the start of his professional writing career.

Personal life and death

While Updike was still a student at Harvard, he married Mary Entwistle Pennington, an art student at Radcliffe College. She took him to Oxford, England, where she attended art school and where their first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1955. The pair had three more children together: writer David (born 1957), artist Michael (born 1959), and artist Miranda (born 1960). They divorced in 1974. Updike had seven grandsons.

Martha Ruggles Bernhard, who lived in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, for more than thirty years, was married in 1977. On January 27, 2009, he died of lung cancer at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, at the age of 76.

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Career as a writer

Updike served as a full-staff writer at The New Yorker for only two years, writing "Talk of the Town" columns and submitting poems and short stories to the newspaper. Updike wrote the poems and stories that would fill his early books, like The Carpentered Hen (1958) and The Same Door (1959). Updike's early involvement with The New Yorker inspired these works. J. D. Salinger ("A&P"); John Cheever ("Snowing in Greenwich Village"); and Vladimir Nabokov Marcel Proust, Henry Green, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov were among J. D. Salinger's early work.

Updike went through a profound spiritual crisis during this period. He began reading Sn Kierkegaard and the theologian Karl Barth, suffering from a lack of religious belief. Both deeply influenced his own religious convictions, which in turn figured prominently in his fiction. For the remainder of his life, Updike was a devoted Christian.

Updike and his family were later relocated to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where they later moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts. Several commentators, including a columnist in the local Ipswich Chronicle, claimed that the fictional town of Tarbox in Couples was based on Ipswich. In a letter to the paper, Updike denied the suggestion. In a letter sent to the same newspaper published soon after Updike's death and written by a friend and contemporary, Impressions of Updike's day-to-day life in Ipswich during the 1960s and 1970s are included. Updike wrote Rabbit, Run (1960), two of his most celebrated and popular books in Ipswich; the latter received the National Book Award.

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a former high school basketball player and middle-class gon who will be featured in Updike's most enduring and critically acclaimed role, appeared in Rabbit, Run. Updike wrote three more books about him. In Time's All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels, Rabbit, Run was included.

Despite the fact that Updike's career and reputation were sustained and increased by his long association with The New Yorker, which published him on a daily basis throughout his career, despite the fact that he had left the magazine after only two years. With a focus on the American home from the point of view of a male writer, Updike's memoir reveals that he stayed in his "corner of New England to give its domestic news." Updike's deal with the magazine made it the first bid for his short-story manuscripts, but the journal's editor, William Shawn, dismissed several as too specific.

The Maple short stories, which were collected in Too Far To Go (1979), depicted Updike's first marriage, as "separating" (1974) and "Here Come the Maples" (1976), both referring to his separation. These stories also illustrate the role of alcohol in 1970s America. They were the inspiration for the television show Too Far To Go, which was also broadcast by NBC in 1979.

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

Rabbit Redux, Updike's reaction to the 1960s, reflected a lot of Updike's resentment and hostility against the country's political and cultural transitions at the time.

Updike's early Olinger period was set in the Pennsylvania of his youth, but the lyrical Of the Farm arrived in 1965.

Updike's early books became well-known for his chronicling infidelity, adultery, and marital strife, especially in suburban America; and his ambiguous representation of the confusion and liberation inherent in this period of social transitions. It was once "a subject that, if I hadn't exhausted, has exhausted me." Couples (1968), a book about adultery set in a small fictional Massachusetts town called Tarbox, is one of Updike's most popular of Updike's novels of this vein. With the headline "The Adulterous Society," Updike made a splash on the front cover of Time magazine. Both the journal article and, to a degree, the book sparked national anxiety about whether American society was abandoning all social norms of conduct in sexual matters.

Updike began working in a new territory during Coup (1978), a widely circulated book about an African tyrant inspired by his visit to Africa.

He wrote another book starring Harry Angstrom, Rabbit Is Rich, which received the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1980, all three major American literary awards. "Rabbit the fat and content owner of a Toyota dealership," the book found. Updike found it difficult to finish the book because he was "having so much fun" in the fictional county Rabbit and his family inhabited.

Updike wrote The Witches of Eastwick (1984), a fun book about witches living in Rhode Island. He referred to it as an effort to "make it right with my" -- what should we say, feminist detractors." It was one of Updike's most popular books and was included in Harold Bloom's list of canonical twentieth-century literature (in The Western Canon). The Widows of Eastwick, a return to the witches of old age, was published in 2008. Updike published The Widows of Eastwick in 2008. It was his last published book.

He published Roger's Version, the second volume of the so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy, in 1986, about an effort to show God's existence using a computer program. Martin Amis, a writer and commentator, called it a "near-masterpiece." Updike's reworking of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter brought the novel S. (1989), which uncharacteristically starring a female protagonist.

Updike loved working in series; a recurrent Updike alter ego is the modestly well-known, unprolific Jewish novelist and potential Nobel Laureate Henry Bech (1979), and Bech at Bay (1998). These stories were collected in Everyman's Library's Complete Henry Bech (2001). Bech is a comedic and self-conscious antithesis of Updike's own literary persona: Jewish, a World War II soldier, reclusive, and unprolific to a fault.

Rabbit at Rest, his last Rabbit book, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990, was published in 1990. The novel, which is over 500 pages long, is one of Updike's most celebrated. Updike brought the Rabbit saga to an end in 2000, with the novella Rabbit Remembered. Updike is one of only four writers to have received two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, thanks to his Pulitzer Prizes for his last two Rabbit books, including William Faulkner, Booth Tarkington, and Colson Whitehead.

The four books were collected and canonized by Everyman's Library in 1995; Updike wrote an introduction in which Rabbit was "a ticket to the America all around me." What I saw through Rabbit's eyes was more relevant than what I saw on my own, although the difference was often small." Rabbit later became "a brother to me" and a good friend. "He introduced me as a writer."

Updike spent the remainder of the 1990s and early 2000s publishing novels in a variety of genres after the publication of Rabbit at Rest, a popular trend; the work of this period was often experimental in nature. These styles included Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), Brazil's magical realism (1994), the science fiction of Towards the End of Time (1997), Gertrude and Claudius (2000), and Seek My Face (2002).

He wrote what seemed to be a more conventional book In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), a historical saga that has spanned many generations and exploring America's cinematic themes, as well as exploring notions of faith and cinema. It is regarded as the most popular novel of Updike's late career. Some commentators have suggested that posterity will regard the novel as a "late masterpiece overlooked or lauded by rote in its time, only to be revived by another generation," while others, while appreciating the English mastery in the book, felt it overly dense with minute detail and flooded with symbolic images and spiritual sadness. In Villages (2004), Updike returned to New England's familiar territory of infidelities. Terrorist (2006), his 22nd book, the tale of a fervent young Muslim in New Jersey, attracted worldwide attention, but not much critical praise.

Updike published The Early Stories, a large collection of his short stories from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. It has been more than 800 pages long and has over a hundred stories, according to Updike's book "a richly episodic and lyrical Bildungsroman," in which he follows the evolution of childhood, college, married life, fatherhood, divorce, and divorce. In 2004, it received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Nevertheless, several stories from his short-story collections of the same period were omitted from this long book.

Updike's publications included fiction, poetry (the bulk of it appeared in Collected Poems, 1993), essays (collected in nine separate volumes), a film (Buchanan Dying, 1974), and a memoir (Self-Consciousness, 1989).

Updike's list includes two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three National Humanities Medal awards, the 1989 National Humanities Medal, and the Rea Award for outstanding achievement. Updike was selected to deliver the 2008 Jefferson Lecture, the highest humanities award in the United States; Updike was titled "The Clarity of Things: What Is American about American Art."

Updike was writing a book about St. Paul and early Christianity at the end of his life. The New Yorker published an appreciation of Updike's lifetime with the magazine, naming him "one of the best of all modern writers, the first American writer to articulate fully, and the man who cracked the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American literature."

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