John Updike

Author John Updike (born 1932) mirrored his America in poems, short stories, essays, and novels, especially the four-volume "Rabbit" series.

John Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. His father, Wesley, was a high school mathematics teacher, the model for several sympathetic father figures in Updike's early works. Because Updike's mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, nurtured literary aspirations of her own, books were a large part of the boy's early life. This fertile environment prepared the way for a prolific career which began in earnest at the age of 22, upon the publication of his first story, "Friends from Philadelphia, " in the New Yorker in 1954.

Updike admired the New Yorker and aspired to become a cartoonist for that periodical. He majored in English at Harvard where he developed his skills as a graphic artist and cartoonist for the Lampoon, the college's humor magazine. In 1953, his junior year at Harvard, he married Mary Pennington, a Radcliffe art student. Upon graduation the following year, Updike and his bride went to London where he had won a Knox fellowship for study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford.

He returned to the United States in 1955 and took a job as a staff writer at the New Yorker at the invitation of famed editor E. B. White, achieving a life-long goal. But after two years and many "Talk of the Town" columns, he left New York for Ipswich, Massachusetts, to devote himself full time to his own writing.

Twenty Years of Poetry

Updike began his remarkable career as a poet in 1958 by publishing his first volume, a collection of poems titled The Carpentered Hen. It is a book of light, amusing verse in the style of Ogden Nash and Robert Service. The poetry possesses several stylistic conventions shared by his fiction: careful attention to the sounds of words and the nuances of their meanings, the use of popular culture by identifying objects by familiar brand names, and the mimicry of the popular press through advertising language and newspaper editorial boosterism. For example, a trivial snippet from Life magazine becomes the basis of a poem called "Youth's Progress, " which ostensibly details the physical metamorphosis of a young boy into an adult. "Dick Schneider of Wisconsin … was elected 'Greek God' for an interfraternity ball, " states the original excerpt from Life. The poem takes its cue from this by citing the common milestones of developing youth: "My teeth were firmly braced and much improved./ Two years went by; my tonsils were removed." The poet then playfully contrasts the narcissistic concerns of youth with the uniquely American optimistic faith in democracy, culminating in the assertion that even Greek divinity is accessible to the common man: "At twenty-one, I was elected Zeus."

Updike's output of light verse diminished with the publication of each succeeding volume of poems, and he stated later that he "writes no light verse now." His poetry has been collected in several volumes, among them Telephone Poles and Other Poems (1963); Midpoint (1969), which is an introspective assessment of the midpoint of his life; and Tossing and Turning (1977), which some critics consider his finest collection of verse. Much of the verse has been collected in a chronological format in a one-volume edition called Collected Poems: 1953-1993 (1993). Updike's poetry continued to appear in publications such as Poetry and the New Yorker.

The "Rabbit" Series and Other Novels

John Updike's first novel, published in 1959, was called Poorhouse Fair. It is a dystopian portrayal of an imaginary place under cruel conditions in the tradition of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, depicting life in a welfare state projected twenty years into the future, the late 1970s. The conflict between Conner, the young prefect of the home with an obsession for order, and Hook, a 94-year-old inmate who rebels against regimentation, is unresolved by the end of the novel, causing certain critics considerable discomfort with its ambiguity, especially Norman Podhoretz and other Commentary reviewers.

Although Updike's reputation rests on his complete body of works, he was first established as a major American writer upon the publication of his novel Rabbit Run (1960), although at that date no one could have predicted the rich series of novels that would follow it. It chronicled the life of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, creating as memorable an American character as Hester Prynne, Jay Gatsby, and Bigger Thomas. Harry Angstrom's life peaked in high school where he was admired as a superb basketball player. By the age of 26 he is washed up in a dead-end job, demonstrating gadgets in a dime store, living a disappointed and constricted life: "I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate." His primal reaction to this problem is to run (as would his namesake). And like Christian in the beginning of Pilgrim's Progress, he runs, fleeing his wife and family as though the salvation of his soul depends upon it. The climax of Rabbit's search results in tragedy, but it is to the credit of Updike's skill that great sympathy for a not-very-likable character is extracted from readers.

The second novel in the series, Rabbit Redux (1971), takes up the story of Harry Angstrom ten years later at the age of 36. Updike continues Rabbit's story against a background of current events. The novel begins on the day of the moon shot. It is the late 1960s and the optimism of American technology is countered by the despair of race riots, anti-Vietnam protests, and the drug culture. Rabbit is nostalgic for the secure serenity of the Eisenhower years. But his world is unsettled by realization that the old way of life is rapidly disappearing, his mother is dying of disease, and his father is aged. Rabbit has become complacent in the face of change. His wife, Janice, from whom he fled in Rabbit Run, now flees him and his inertia. His family is falling apart, mirroring divisive problems of the country at large. Rabbit finally overcomes his complacency and brings "outsiders" into his home, attempting to reconstitute his family. Although some critics were disappointed, Charles Thomas Samuels and Eugene Lyons among them, most, like Brendan Gill and Richard Locke, considered Rabbit Redux a successful novel.

The next book in the series was Rabbit Is Rich (1981), which won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. Rabbit is 46 and finally successful, selling Japanese fuel-efficient cars during the time of the oil crisis in the 1970s. In this novel Rabbit's son Nelson's failure becomes the counterweight to Rabbit's success. Updike describes an upper-middle-class milieu of Caribbean vacations and wife-swapping. Nelson revives Rabbit's vice of irresponsibility but without the grace Rabbit possessed in his youth. Rabbit again becomes the source of family salvation. He steps in for the missing Nelson to be present at the birth of his grandchild. In a sense, the loss of momentum represented by the fuel shortage and the consequent slowing of industry, and even the aging Harry Angstrom, is tentatively renewed by this young life. Updike offers slender hope in a bleak American landscape.

Rabbit at Rest (1990) brings Rabbit into the 1980s to confront an even grimmer set of problems: AIDS, cocaine addiction, and terrorism. Rabbit suffers a heart attack and is haunted by ghosts of his past. Death looms ever larger. The fragility of life and the randomness of death are represented for Harry by the Lockerbie tragedy where death becomes as inevitable as "falling from the burst-open airplane: he too is falling, helplessly falling, toward death." In these four novels an insignificant life presses and insists itself upon our consciousness, and we realize that this life has become the epic of our common American experience recorded over three decades.

Updike wrote many other major novels, including The Centaur (1963), Couples (1965), A Month of Sundays (1975), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), and Brazil (1993). Updike was also the author of several volumes of short stories, among them Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Music School (1966), Bech: A Book (1970), Museums and Women (1972), and Bech Is Back (1982). His novel In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) was met with mixed reviews from such esteemed literary critics as Gore Vidal. In addition to being a prolific novelist, Updike also released several volumes of essays, two being Odd Jobs (1991) and Just Looking: Essays on Art (1989). In 1996, he released a collection, Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (1996), which was met with favorable reviews. David Owen wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "Like plenty of other golfers, I suspect, I wish that John Updike had spent fewer man-years dutifully weighing the merits of unappealing foreign novels and more reflecting on his slice."

Updike has been honored throughout his career: twice he received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He also received the American Book Award and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Updike has been one of the most prolific American authors of his time, leading even his most ardent fans to confess, as Sean French did in New Statesman and Society, "…Updike can write faster than I can read…"

Further Reading

For Updike's discussion of himself and his work, his own Picked-up Pieces (1975) is useful because it contains interviews of Updike by others. Michael A. Olivas has compiled a useful bibliography called An Annotated Bibliography of John Updike Criticism, 1967-1973. For an early dissenting opinion on Updike see Norman Podhoretz's Doings and Undoings (1964). For good, concise, non-ideological discussions of Updike and his novels, see Robert Detweiler's Twain Edition of John Updike (1984). See also Donald Greiner's John Updike's Novels (1984). For a wide selection of reviews and essays, see William Macnaughton's Critical Essays on John Updike (1982). □

Updike, John [Hoyer] (1932–), Pennsylvania‐born novelist and poet, after graduation from Harvard (1954) worked for The New Yorker (1955–57), before publishing his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), a short work about the revolt of a poorhouse's aged inhabitants against a sociologically oriented director, a seeming parable about individuals' antipathy to the welfare state. Rabbit, Run (1960), a full‐length novel, treats an unstable, immature young man who, still hankering for the glamour and applause of his days as a high‐school athlete, deserts his wife and child. Rabbit Redux⧫ (1971) is a sequel whose protagonist, age 36, is now seen with his life having crumbled around him. In a later sequel, Rabbit Is Rich⧫ (1981, Pulitzer Prize), the major character is middle‐aged and well‐to‐do. Rabbit at Rest (1990) is the final novel about ex‐basketball player Harry Rabbit Angstrom, his lively complaints, and his end. The Centaur (1963) combines realism with mythology in presenting three days important in the lives of a teenager and his father, a high‐school science teacher, who, like other characters, are also presented as figures of Greek mythology, respectively Prometheus and Chiron, the centaur who was a teacher of heroes. Of the Farm (1965) presents tensions between a man's mother and his second wife. Updike's fiction had all been set in or near his small hometown in Pennsylvania, but his next novel, Couples (1968), like many succeeding works, takes place in Tarbox, which is similar to Ipswich, Mass., to which he moved in 1957. It depicts the town's stylish set of young marrieds in their almost religious observance of modern morality with its easygoing sexual pairings. Bech: A Book (1970) takes a new subject in portraying a successful Jewish novelist in a quest for approbation; Bech Is Back (1982) is a sequel. A Month of Sundays (1975) portrays a clergyman's sexual adventures during a month's enforced stay in a rest home. Marry Me (1976) tells of two couples' affairs when they exchange mates. The Coup (1979) is a semi‐comic view of the head of state of a barren African nation. The Witches of Eastwick (1984) concerns three mischievous suburban divorcees, their sexual adventures with Satan, and the curse they put on Eastwick, Rhode Island. Roger's Version (1986) is about Professor Roger Lambert, whose life is disrupted by an intense student with whom his wife has an affair. S (1988) treats worthless 42‐year‐old Sarah Worth of New England, who joins a fallacious pseudo‐Hindu religious colony in Arizona from which she disputatiously writes to her husband, other family, and associates. Buchanan Dying (1974) is a play about the onetime President. Updike returns to this subject in Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), a novel wherein the narrator, a professor of history at “a third‐rate college,” has spent years on his unfinished biography of Buchanan, large portions of which we read, alternating with chapters in the professor's love life reminiscent of Couples. Brazil (1994) is a novel of love and criminality whose main characters, Isabel and Tristão, take their tone, as Updike notes in an afterword, from Joseph Bédier's Romance of Tristan and Iseult. Stories are collected in many volumes, including The Same Door (1959), Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Music School (1966), Museums and Women (1972), Too Far To Go (1979), Problems (1979), Trust Me (1987), and The After Life: And Other Stories (1994), variations on the theme of middle age. Updike is a brilliant stylist in his fiction, but he has also written many poems, generally light, collected in The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958), Telephone Poles (1963), Midpoint (1969), Seventy Poems (1972), Tossing and Turning (1977), Facing Nature (1985), and Collected Poems (1993). Picking Up Pieces (1975), Hugging the Shore (1983), and Odd Jobs (1991) contain book reviews, interviews, and essays, while Just Looking (1989) focuses exclusively on essays on art. Self‐Consciousness (1989) is a memoir, in part of youth, but also a comment on his belief in a personal God and recollections of his acceptance of the U.S. warfare in Vietnam during the 1960s.

John Updike 1932–2009, American author, one of the nation's most distinguished 20th-century men of letters, b. Shillington, Pa., grad. Harvard, 1954. In his many novels and stories, written in a well-modulated prose of extraordinary beauty, lyricism, and dazzling fluidity and with a sure eye for the details of ordinary domestic life, Updike usually treats the tensions and frustrations of the middle class, often mingling the joys and sorrows of suburban life with a current of existential dread. His "Rabbit quartet," perhaps his most famous novels, begins with Rabbit Run (1961), which, set in Pennsylvania in the 1950s, concerns the young Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a sort of surburban everyman who yearns for his days as a high school basketball star, hates his salesman's job, and, fleeing a loveless marriage, deserts his wife and child. The next books follow him through three decades of American life. In Rabbit Redux (1971), he 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).

Remarkably prolific, Updike produced about a book a year, publishing 60 volumes during his lifetime as well as reams of miscellaneous writings. His other novels include The Poorhouse Fair (1959); The Centaur (1962); the sensual Couples (1968); the exotic The Coup (1978); the wickedly comic The Witches of Eastwick (1984) and its sequel, The Widows of Eastwick (2008); the epic In the Beauty of the Lilies (1995); Seek My Face (2002); and The Terrorist (2006). Among his volumes of poetry, many consisting of light verse, are The Carpentered Hen (1958), Facing Nature (1985), Americana (2001), and Endpoint and Other Poems (2009). His many superb short-story collections include Pigeon Feathers (1962), Museums and Women and Other Stories (1972), Problems (1979), The Afterlife and Other Stories (1994), My Father's Tears and Other Stories (2009), and the linked stories that feature Updike's Jewish, urban, unmarried, and writer's-blocked alter ego, Henry Bech: Bech: A Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1982), and Bech at Bay (1998). Updike also wrote the play Buchanan Dying (1974) and a variety of nonfiction—literary criticism, e.g., Hugging the Shore (1983), Odd Jobs (1991), More Matter (1999), and Due Considerations (2007); art criticism, e.g., Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005); and essays on numerous subjects, e.g., Golf Dreams (1996).

Bibliography: See his memoirs (1989); J. Plath, ed., Conversations with John Updike (1994); 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); J. De Bellis, The John Updike Encyclopedia (2000).

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

Updike, John (Hoyer) (1932– ), American novelist, short- story writer, and poet, born in Pennsylvania, and educated at Harvard. His novels include the tetralogy Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990), a small-town domestic tragi-comedy which traces the career of ex-basketball champion Harry Angstrom from the early days of his precarious marriage to alcoholic Janice, through the social and sexual upheavals of the 1960s, to the compromises of middle age; The Centaur (1963) uses a mythological framework to explore the relationship of a schoolmaster father and his teenage son; and Couples (1968) is a portrait of sexual passion and realignment amongst young suburban married couples in Tarbox, Mass., a town which in this and succeeding works takes on an archetypal quality.

Updike's characteristic preoccupations with the erotic, with the pain and striving implicit in human relationships, and with the sacred in daily life, are conveyed in an ornate, highly charged prose, which reaches its most flamboyant in an atypical work, The Coup (1979), an exotic first-person narration by the ex-dictator of a fictitious African state. Other novels include The Witches of Eastwick (1984), Memoirs of the Ford Administration (1993), Brazil (1994), and Gertrude and Claudius (2000), based on the characters in Hamlet. A Month of Sundays (1975), Roger's Version (1986), and S (1988) form a linked sequence based on reworkings of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. His other publications include volumes of short stories, selections of reviews and essays. Collected Poems 1953–1992 appeared in 1993.

Updike, John Hoyer (1932– ) US writer. Updike is best known for his lyrical chronicles of Rabbit Angstrom, whose relationship crises often reflect contemporary social pressures. The tetralogy began with Rabbit Run (1960) and Rabbit Redux (1971). Rabbit is Rich (1981) won a Pulitzer Prize. Rabbit at Rest (1990) completed the series. Other novels, which explore sexuality and morality, include Couples (1968) and The Witches of Eastwick (1984, filmed 1987). A regular contributor to New Yorker magazine since 1955, Updike is a master of shorter prose, such as the essay collection Hugging the Shore (1984) and the short-story collection Forty Stories (1987).