John Updike

John Hoyer Updike (Reading, Pennsylvania, 1932 - Danvers, Massachusetts, 2009) was one of the most prolific American writers of the later twentieth century. He wrote novels, short stories, poetry, essays, children's books and art and literary criticism, and he is best known for realist fiction about the middle-class life of small-town America. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, and his work is often considered among the most accomplished portraits of postwar American everyday life.

He was born in Reading but grew up in nearby Shillington, where his father, a high school teacher on temporary contracts, supported the family on a meagre salary in the aftermath of the 1929 crash. His mother, who hoped to publish her own writing, encouraged his interest in writing and art. He won a scholarship to Harvard, where he presided over The Harvard Lampoon and graduated in English in 1954. He then studied art at Oxford, intending at first to become a cartoonist, and returned to New York to write for The New Yorker, which published hundreds of his pieces from the mid-1950s onward.

In 1957 he moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, which later served as the model for the fictional town of Tarbox. Much of his mature work was written there. A period of loss of religious faith in New York led him to read Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, and Christian belief runs through much of what he wrote. His best-known work is the Rabbit series about Harry Angstrom, a former high school basketball star whose life is followed over several decades, from youth to death. The two Pulitzer-winning novels, Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), show a man increasingly comfortable and disillusioned. Updike also wrote frankly about adultery and marital unrest, which made him a controversial chronicler of suburban life, as in Couples (1968).

His style pairs meticulous realism with a rich and sometimes unusual vocabulary. He described ordinary surroundings in careful, almost technical detail, and he said his aim was to give the mundane its due. That attention to the everyday, combined with carefully crafted prose, marks his short stories, which appeared in collections over five decades.

His legacy lies in American fiction that observes middle-class life seriously and without easy irony. The Rabbit novels and The Witches of Eastwick, adapted as a film in 1987, remain the most widely read of his many books.