John Updike

John Updike 1932-, American author, b. Shillington, Pa., grad. Harvard, 1954. His novels and stories, written in a well-modulated prose of extraordinary beauty and dazzling fluidity, usually treat the tensions and frustrations of middle-class life, often mingling the joys and sorrows of suburban life with a current of existential dread. The classic novel Rabbit Run (1961), set in Pennsylvania in the 1950s, concerns a young man who yearns for his days as a high school athlete and deserts his wife and child. In Rabbit Redux (1971), the same hero confronts racial tension, job obsolescence, sexual freedom, drugs, violence, and the alienation of the young. The quartet continues with Rabbit Is Rich (1981; Pulitzer Prize) and ends with Rabbit at Rest (1990; Pulitzer Prize). The Rabbit characters are brought up to date in Rabbit Remembered, a novella-sequel included in the volume Licks of Love (2000).

The remarkably prolific author's other works include the novels The Poorhouse Fair (1959), The Centaur (1962), Couples (1968), The Coup (1978), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), In the Beauty of the Lilies (1995), Seek My Face (2002), and Terrorist (2006) and volumes of poetry such as The Carpentered Hen (1958), Facing Nature (1985), and Americana (2001). Among his many short-story collections are Pigeon Feathers (1962), Museums and Women and Other Stories (1972), Problems (1979), The Afterlife and Other Stories (1994), and the linked stories that feature Updike's Jewish alter ego, Henry Bech: Bech: A Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1982), and Bech at Bay (1998). The Early Stories: 1953-1975, a compilation, was published in 2003. Updike has also written the play Buchanan Dying (1974); literary criticism, e.g., Hugging the Shore (1983), Odd Jobs (1991), More Matter (1999), and Due Considerations (2007); and art criticism, e.g., Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005).

Bibliography: See his memoirs, Self-Consciousness (1989); J. Plath, ed., Conversations with John Updike (1994); J. De Bellis, The John Updike Encyclopedia (2000); studies by D. Thorburn and H. Eiland, ed. (1979), W. R, Macnaughton, ed. (1982), J. Detweiler (rev. ed. 1984), J. H. Campbell (1987), J. Newman (1988), R. M. Luscher (1993), J. A. Schiff (1998), J. Yerkes, ed. (1999), W. H. Pritchard (2000), J. De Bellis, ed. (2005), and P. J. Bailey (2006).

Updike, John (1932– ), novelist, essayist, poet, short‐story writer.The only child in a relatively poor family, Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, during the Great Depression. His father, Wesley, taught in the local high school, while his mother, Linda, hoped to make her mark as a writer. The family moved to an isolated farm in Plowville, Pennsylvania, when Updike was thirteen, a move he resented as later recounted in “Flight” (Pigeon Feathers, 1962), “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood” (Assorted Prose, 1965), and Of the Farm (1965). Updike won a scholarship to Harvard, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1954 after majoring in English. He then studied art at the Ruskin School in Oxford before returning to the United States in 1955 to work for two years at the New Yorker magazine. Updike's decades‐long association with the New Yorker had begun on 30 October 1954, when the magazine published his first professional short story, “Friends from Philadelphia” (reprinted in The Same Door, 1959).

After moving to Massachusetts in 1957, he launched the career that would make him a leading writer of his generation. Twice winner of the National Book Award (The Centaur, 1963; Hugging the Shore, 1983) and of the Pulitzer Prize (Rabbit Is Rich, 1981; Rabbit at Rest, 1990), he was honored for his meticulously detailed depiction of the American middle class. The four so‐called Rabbit novels (including Rabbit, Run, 1960, and Rabbit Redux, 1971) trace the decline of religious surety and social cohesiveness in America after 1950 and illustrate Updike's skill at evoking specific historical and cultural contexts. By the end of the twentieth century he had published more than forty books.
See also Literature: Since World War I.

Bibliography

Donald J. Greiner , John Updike's Novels, 1984.
Donald J. Greiner , John Updike, in Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Novelists since World War II, eds. James R. Giles and Wanda H. Giles, 3d series, vol. 143, 1994, pp. 250–76.

Donald J. Greiner