Updike, John (1932-2009), was an American author of novels, short stories, essays, and poetry. Updike became noted for his elaborate, lyrical prose style. He served as a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine from 1955 to 1957 and built his literary reputation as a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.
Much of Updike’s fiction explores the superficial but seductive materialism he sees in middle-class American life. Typical Updike characters are self-absorbed, guilt-ridden, and obsessed with their own unimportance and the prospect of their death. They relieve their anxieties through marital unfaithfulness, but this fails to help them in their search for spiritual salvation. These characters appear in such novels as A Month of Sundays (1975) and Marry Me (1976).
In the novel Couples (1968) and the stories collected in Museums and Women (1972), Updike dramatized the disintegrating morals and marriages in several suburban families. The autobiographical stories in Too Far to Go (1979) narrate the course of the Maple family from newlywed happiness to divorce.
Updike’s first popular work, Rabbit, Run (1960), is a novel about Rabbit Angstrom, a former high school basketball star bewildered by family responsibilities. In Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit confronts such issues of the late 1960’s as drug use, racial violence, and the Vietnam War (1957-1975). Rabbit Is Rich (1981) portrays Rabbit in middle age, wealthy but spiritually unfulfilled. Rabbit Is Rich won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Updike also won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit at Rest (1990), the fourth novel in the series, which describes Rabbit’s retirement. Updike continued the story in the short novel “Rabbit Remembered,” which was published in the short story collection Licks of Love (2000).
Updike’s other novels include The Centaur (1963), The Coup (1978), The Witches of Eastwick (1984) and a sequel called The Widows of Eastwick (2008), Roger’s Version (1986), S. (1988), Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), Gertrude and Claudius (2000), Villages (2004), and Terrorist (2006). In 2013, the Library of America published two volumes of Updike’s short stories as Collected Early Stories: 1953-1975 and Collected Later Stories: 1976-2008. Updike wrote several related stories about a novelist named Henry Bech, collected in Bech: A Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1982), and Bech at Bay (1998). Updike’s essays on art appeared in Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005). His other essays and nonfiction were collected in Assorted Prose (1965), Picked Up Pieces (1975), Hugging the Shore (1983), Odd Jobs (1991), More Matter (1999), and Due Considerations (2007). Updike’s poems were published in Collected Poems: 1953-1993. Self-Consciousness (1989) is a memoir. He edited The Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999). A selection of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism was published in 2011, after his death, as Higher Gossip.
John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. Many of the early stories in Pigeon Feathers (1962) deal with the experiences of young people in a town based on Shillington. Updike died on Jan. 27, 2009.
