Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Updike photographed working at his home in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts in 1978. (Photo by Jack Mitchell)
School period
College/University
Gallery of John Updike
Cambridge, MA, United States
In 1954, Updike graduated from Harvard University with a thesis titled "Non-Horatian Elements in Robert Herrick's Imitations and Echoes of Horace."
Career
Gallery of John Updike
1966
65-30 Kissena Blvd, Flushing, NY 11367, United States
Writer and critic John Updike on stage in November 1966 at an event for Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko at Queens College in New York City, New York. (Photo by David Gahr)
Gallery of John Updike
John Updike holding a cigar and looking pensive. Undated.
Gallery of John Updike
1971
American author John Updike (1932-2009), photographed for Esquire magazine in 1971. (Photo by Baron Wolman)
Gallery of John Updike
1979
London, United Kingdom
American novelist and critic, John Updike (1932-2009) pictured sitting in an armchair in London on March 22, 1979. (Photo by United News/Popperfoto)
Gallery of John Updike
1979
London, United Kingdom
American novelist and critic, John Updike (1932-2009) pictured in London on March 22, 1979. (Photo by United News/Popperfoto)
Gallery of John Updike
1988
New York, United States
John Updike talks to an interviewer at his publisher's office in New York City. Photo: Henny Abrams.
Gallery of John Updike
2004
London, United Kingdom
Writer John Updike is photographed for the Telegraph on May 29, 2004, in London, England. (Photo by Harry Borden/Contour)
65-30 Kissena Blvd, Flushing, NY 11367, United States
Writer and critic John Updike on stage in November 1966 at an event for Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko at Queens College in New York City, New York. (Photo by David Gahr)
John Updike holding a cigar and looking pensive. Undated.
Connections
Spouse: Martha Ruggles Bernhard
1978
Massachusetts, United States
Author John Updike photographed with his wife Martha at his home in Massachusetts in November 1978, the year his bestseller The Coup was published. (Photo by Jack Mitchell)
(Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as o...)
Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his - or any other - generation. Its hero is Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty - even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler's edge.
(The provocative novel about sex in suburbia, striking in ...)
The provocative novel about sex in suburbia, striking in its complete sexual frankness and rightly praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrayal of love, marriage, and adultery in America.
(In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the sp...)
In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower's becalmed America has become 1969's lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his past reduced to a ruined inner landscape; still, he clings to semblances of decency and responsibility, and yearns to belong and to believe.
(The hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run, ten years after th...)
The hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run, ten years after the events of Rabbit Redux, has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as the chief sales representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national self-confidence. Nevertheless, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy life at last - until his wayward son, Nelson, returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to the lot. New characters and old populate these scenes from Rabbit's middle age as he continues to pursue, in his zigzagging fashion, the rainbow of happiness.
John Updike was an American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer who brought the neuroses and the shifting sexual mores of the American middle class to the fore. He published more than 20 novels, a dozen collections of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Updike was one of only three writers to win the Pulitzer-Prize for Fiction twice.
Background
John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pennsylvania, United States, to Wesley Russell and Linda Updike, née Hoyer. He was an eleventh generation American, and his family spent his childhood in Shillington, Pennsylvania, living with Linda's parents. Shillington served as a base for his fictional town of Olinger, the embodiment of suburbia.
Education
Aged six, Updike started cartooning, and in 1941 he took drawing and painting lessons. In 1944, his paternal aunt gave the Updikes a subscription to The New Yorker, and cartoonist James Thurber gave him one of his dog drawings, which Updike kept in his study as a talisman his whole life.
Updike published his first story, "A Handshake with the Congressman," in the February 16, 1945 edition of his high school publication Chatterbox. That same year, his family relocated to a farmhouse in the nearby town of Plowville. "Whatever creative or literary aspects I had were developed out of sheer boredom those two years before I got my driver's license," was how he described these early teenage years. In high school, he was known as "the sage" and as someone who "hopes to write for a living." By the time he graduated high school in 1950 as president and co-valedictorian, he had contributed 285 items, between articles, drawings, and poems, to the Chatterbox. He enrolled in Harvard on a tuition scholarship, and while there he revered the Harvard Lampoon, for which he produced more than 40 poems and drawings in his first year alone.
In 1954, Updike graduated from Harvard University with a thesis titled "Non-Horatian Elements in Robert Herrick's Imitations and Echoes of Horace."
Updike's first prose work, "The Different One," was published in the Harvard Lampoon in 1951. In 1953, he was named editor of the Harvard Lampoon, and novelist and professor Albert Guerard awarded him an A for a story on a former basketball player.
He won a Knox fellowship which enabled him to attend Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. While in Oxford, he met Elwyn Brooks White and his wife Katharine White, who was the fiction editor of The New Yorker. She offered him a job and the magazine bought ten poems and four stories; his first story, "Friends from Philadelphia," appears on the October 30, 1954, issue.
The year 1955 saw his move to New York, where he took the role of "Talk of the Town" reporter for The New Yorker. He became "Talk Writer" for the magazine, which refers to a writer whose copy is ready for publication without revisions. After the birth of his second son, Updike left New York and relocated to Ipswich, Massachusetts.
In 1959, he published his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, and he started reading Søren Kierkegaard. He won a Guggenheim fellowship to support the writing of Rabbit, Run, which was published in 1960 by Knopf. It focused on the lackluster life and graphic sexual escapades of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a former high school football star stuck in a dead-end job. Updike had to make changes prior to publication in order to avoid possible lawsuits for obscenity.
In 1962, Rabbit, Run was published in London by Deutsch, and he spent the fall of that year making "emendations and restorations" while living in Antibes. Revising the Rabbit saga would become a lifelong habit of his. "Rabbit, Run, in keeping with its jittery, indecisive protagonist, exists in more forms than any other novel of mine," he wrote in The New York Times in 1995. Following the success of Rabbit, Run, he published the important memoir "The Dogwood Tree" in Martin Levin's Five Boyhoods.
His 1963 novel, The Centaur, was awarded the National Book Award and the French literary prize Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger.
In 1966, his short story "The Bulgarian Poetess," published in his collection The Music School, won his first O. Henry Prize. In 1968, he published Couples, a novel where protestant sexual mores clash with the post-pill sexual liberation of the 1960s. Couples garnered so much praise that it landed Updike on the cover of Time.
In 1970, Updike published Rabbit Redux, the first sequel of Rabbit, Run, and received the Signet Society Medal for Achievement in the Arts. Parallel to Rabbit, he also created another mainstay in his character universe, Henry Bech, a Jewish bachelor who is a struggling writer. He first appeared in short story collections that would later be compiled in full-length books, namely Bech, A Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1982), and Bech at Bay (1998).
After starting research on president James Buchanan in 1968, he finally published the play Buchanan Dying in 1974, which premiered at the Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on April 29, 1976.
In 1981, he published Rabbit Is Rich, the third volume of the Rabbit quartet. The following year, 1982, Rabbit Is Rich won him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award for Fiction, the three major American literary fiction prizes. "What Makes Rabbit Run," a BBC documentary from 1981, featured Updike as its main subject, following him all over the East Coast as he fulfilled his writerly obligations.
In 1983, his collection of articles and reviews, Hugging the Shore, was published, which earned him the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism the following year. In 1984, he published The Witches of Eastwick, which was adapted in a 1987 film starring Susan Sarandon, Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jack Nicholson. The story deals with the concept of "being old" from the perspective of three women, which marked a departure from Updike's previous work. On November 17, 1989, President George Bush awarded him the National Medal of Arts.
Rabbit at Rest, the final chapter of the Rabbit saga (1990), portrayed the protagonist in old age, struggling with poor health and poor finances. It earned him his second Pulitzer Prize, which is a rarity in the literary world.
The 1990s were quite prolific for Updike, as he experimented with several genres. He published the essay collection, Odd Jobs, in 1991, the historical-fiction work Memories of the Ford Administration in 1992, the magical-realist novel Brazil in 1995, In the Beauty of the Lilies in 1996 - which deals with cinema and religion in America -, the science fiction novel Toward the End of Time in 1997, and Gertrude and Claudius (2000) - a retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet. In 2006, he published the novel Terrorist, about a Muslim extremist in New Jersey.
Beyond his experimentation, during this period he also expanded his New England universe: his story collection Licks of Love (2000) includes the novella Rabbit Remembered. Villages (2004) centers on the middle-aged libertine Owen Mackenzie. In 2008, he also returned to Eastwick to explore what the heroines from his 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick were like during widowhood. This was his last published novel. He died the following year, on January 27, 2009. The cause, his publishing house Alfred Knopf reported, was lung cancer.
(This volume collects 103 stories, almost all of the short...)
2003
Religion
Updike has been raised a Protestant.
Politics
Between 1963 and 1964, John Updike marched in a Civil Rights demonstration and traveled to Russia and Eastern Europe for the State Department in the US-USSR Cultural Exchange Program.
Views
Updike explored and analyzed the American middle class, seeking dramatic tension in everyday interactions such as marriage, sex, and dead-end job dissatisfaction. "My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class. I like middles," he told Jane Howard in a 1966 interview for Life magazine. "It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."
This ambiguity surfaces in the way he approached sex, as he advocated for taking "coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it on the continuum of human behavior," in a 1967 interview with The Paris Review. His characters have an animalistic - rather than romanticized - view of sex and sexuality. He wanted to demystify sex, as the Puritanical legacy of America had harmfully mythologized it. Throughout the course of his work, one can see how his portrayal of sex mirrors the shifting sexual mores in America from the 1950s onwards: his early work has sexual favors parceled out carefully through marriage, while works such as Couples reflect the 1960s sexual revolution, and later works deal with the looming threat of AIDS.
Having been raised a Protestant, Updike prominently featured religion in his works, too, especially the traditional Protestant faith that is so characteristic of middle-class America. In The Beauty of The Lilies (1996), he explores the decline of religion in America alongside the history of cinema, while the characters Rabbit and Piet Hanema are modeled after the readings of Kierkegaard he started undertaking in the mid-1955 - the Lutheran philosopher examined the non-rational nature of life and mankind's need for self-examination.
Unlike his average, middle-class characters, his prose displayed a rich, dense, and at times arcane vocabulary and syntax, fully expressed in his description of sex scenes and anatomy, which proved to be a turn-off for several readers. In later works, however, as he grew more experimental in genre and content, his prose became leaner.
Membership
In 1964, Updike was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, one of the youngest persons ever so honored.
National Institute of Arts and Letters
1964
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Thomas M. Disch: "Updike enjoys such pre-eminence as a novelist that his poetry could be mistaken as a hobby or a foible. It is a poetry of civility - in its epigrammatical lucidity ... and in its tone of vulgar bonhomie and good appetite."
The Los Angeles Times: "[Updike] has earned an ... imposing stance on the literary landscape ... earning virtually every American literary award, repeated bestsellerdom and the near-royal status of the American author-celebrity."
Interests
Сartooning
Connections
In 1953, Updike married Mary Pennington, the daughter of a minister of the First Unitarian Church. Their first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1955. The couple had three more children together: David (born 1957), Michael (born 1959), and Miranda (born 1960).
In 1974, Updike separated from his wife Mary and, in 1977, married Martha Ruggles Bernhard.