Abstract
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,
John Updike, regarded as one of the greatest and most prolific writers in modern American letters, died Tuesday on 27th January 2009.
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 Radcliff 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
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).
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 .
His work has attracted a significant amount of critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered to be one of the great American writers of his time. Updike’s highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of “a wry, intelligent authorial voice” that extravagantly describes the physical world, while remaining squarely in the realist . Updike famously described his own style as an attempt “to give the mundane its beautiful due.”.
Biography 