JOHN HOYER UPDIKE
AKA John Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27,
2009)
Writer John Updike's works are known for
their subtle depiction of American middle-class life. His popular Rabbit series
earned him two Pulitzer prizes.
John Hoyer Updike (born
March 18, 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania) was an American writer. Updike's
most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is
Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest
both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the
American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for
his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and
more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism
and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared
in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and
death, and their inter-relationships. Updike's most famous work is his
"Rabbit" series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is
Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and the novella "Rabbit Remembered"), which
chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit"
Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both
Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit At Rest (1990) were recognized with the
Pulitzer Prize. Updike is one of only three authors (the others were Booth
Tarkington and William Faulkner) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more
than once. He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short
story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and
children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The
New Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review
of Books.
Describing his subject as
"the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike was well
recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his
prolificity. He wrote on average a book a year. Updike populated his fiction
with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must
respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital
infidelity." His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the
concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans; its emphasis on
Christian theology; and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail.
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 tradition. He described his
style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due."
John Updike was born in
Reading, Pennsylvania, and spent his first years in nearby Shillington, a small
town where his father was a high school science teacher. The area surrounding
Reading has provided the setting for many of his stories, with the invented
towns of Brewer and Olinger standing in for Reading and Shillington. An only
child, Updike and his parents shared a house with his grandparents for much of
his childhood. When he was 13, the family moved to his mother's birthplace, a
stone farmhouse on an 80-acre farm near Plowville, eleven miles from
Shillington, where he continued to attend school.
At home, he consumed
popular fiction, especially humor and mysteries. His mother, herself an
aspiring writer, encouraged him to write and draw. He excelled in school and
served as President and co-valedictorian of his graduating class at Shillington
High School. For the first three summers after high school, he worked as a copy
boy at the Reading Eagle newspaper, eventually producing a number of feature
stories for the paper. He received a tuition scholarship to Harvard University,
where he majored in English. As an undergraduate, he wrote stories and drew
cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine, serving as the magazine's
president in his senior year. Before graduating, he married fellow student Mary
E. Pennington. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954, and in that
same year sold a poem and a short story to The New Yorker magazine.
Updike and his wife spent
the following year in England, where Updike studied at Oxford's Ruskin School
of Drawing and Fine Art. While they were in England, their first daughter was
born and Updike met the American writers E. B. and Katharine White, editors at
The New Yorker, who urged him to seek a job at the magazine. On returning from
England, the Updikes settled in Manhattan, where John took a position as a
staff writer at The New Yorker. He worked at the magazine for nearly two years,
writing editorials, features and reviews, but after the birth of a son in 1957,
he decided to move his growing family to the small town of Ipswich,
Massachusetts. He continued to contribute to The New Yorker but resolved to
support his family by writing full-time, without taking a salaried position. He
maintained a lifelong relationship with The New Yorker, where many of his
poems, reviews and short stories appeared, but he resided in Massachusetts for
the rest of his life.
Updike's first book of
poetry, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, was published by Harper
and Brothers in 1958. When the publisher sought changes to the ending of his
first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, he moved to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. The first novel
was well-received, and with support from the Guggenheim Fellowship, Updike
undertook a more ambitious novel, Rabbit, Run. The novel introduced one of
Updike's most memorable characters, the small-town athlete, Harry
"Rabbit" Angstrom. Knopf feared that his frank description of
Rabbit's sexual adventures could lead to prosecution for obscenity, and made a
number of changes to the text. The book was published to widespread acclaim
without legal repercussions. The original text was restored for the British
edition a few years later, and subsequent American editions of the book have
reflected the author's original intent. Updike's reputation as a leading author
of his generation was established.
After the birth of a third
child, Updike rented a one-room office above a restaurant in Ipswich, where he
wrote for several hours every morning, six days a week, a schedule he adhered
to throughout his career. In 1963, he received the National Book Award for his
novel The Centaur, inspired by his childhood in Pennsylvania. The following
year, at age 32, he became the youngest person ever elected to the National
Institute of Arts and Letters, and was invited by the State Department to tour
eastern Europe as part of a cultural exchange program between the United States
and the Soviet Union. In 1967, he joined the author Robert Penn Warren and
other American writers in signing a letter urging Soviet writers to defend
Jewish cultural institutions under attack by the Soviet government. In 1968,
Updike's novel Couples created a national sensation with its portrayal of the
complicated relationships among a set of young married couples in the suburbs.
It remained on the best-seller lists for over a year and prompted a Time
magazine cover story featuring Updike. In Bech: A Book (1970), Updike
introduced a new protagonist, the imaginary novelist Henry Bech, who, like
Rabbit Angstrom, was destined to reappear in Updike's fiction for many years.
Rabbit Angstrom reappeared in Rabbit Redux (1971).
In the 1970s, Updike
continued to travel as a cultural ambassador of the United States, and in 1974
he joined authors John Cheever, Arthur Miller and Richard Wilbur in calling on
the Soviet government to cease its persecution of dissident author Alexander
Solzhenitsyn. Updike separated from his wife Mary in 1974 and moved to Boston
where he taught briefly at Boston University. Two years later, the Updikes were
divorced, and in 1977 he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, settling with her and
her three children in Georgetown, Massachusetts. Rabbit is Rich, published in
1981, received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In
1983 Updike's other alter ego, Harry Bech, reappeared in Bech is Back, and
Updike was featured in a second Time magazine cover story, "Going Great at
50." Among his novels of the 1980s and 1990s are a trilogy retelling The
Scarlet Letter from the points of view of three different characters, and a
prequel to Hamlet, entitled Gertrude and Claudius. In 1991 he received a second
Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit at Rest. He was only the third American to win a
second Pulitzer Prize in the fiction category.
In an autobiographical
essay, Updike famously identified sex, art, and religion as "the three
great secret things" in human experience. The grandson of a Presbyterian
minister (his first father-in-law was also a minister), his writing in all
genres has displayed a preoccupation with philosophical questions. A lifelong
churchgoer and student of Christian theology, the Jesuit magazine America
awarded him its Campion Award in 1997 as a "distinguished Christian person
of letters." He received the National Medal of Art from President George
H.W. Bush in 1989, and in 2003 was presented with the National Medal for the
Humanities from President George W. Bush. He was one of a very few Americans to
receive both of these honors. The same year saw the publication of a
comprehensive collection, The Early Stories, 1953-1975.
John Updike spent his last
years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, in the same corner of New England where
so much of his fiction is set. His last book was The Widows of Eastwick (2008),
a sequel to his 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick. Updike succumbed to lung
cancer the following year at the age of 76.
His awards in 1959
Guggenheim Fellow, 1959 National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award,
1964 National Book Award for Fiction, 1965 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger,
1966 O. Henry Prize, 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, 1982
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1982 National Book Award for Fiction, 1982 Union
League Club Abraham Lincoln Award, 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for
Criticism, 1984 National Arts Club Medal of Honor, 1987 St. Louis Literary
Award, 1987 Ambassador Book Award, 1987 Helmerich Award, the Peggy V. Helmerich
Distinguished Author Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust,
1988 PEN/Malamud Award,1989 National Medal of Arts, 1990 National Book Critics
Circle Award for Fiction, 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1991 O. Henry Prize,
1992 Honorary Doctor of Letters from Harvard University, 1995 William Dean
Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1995 Commandeur de l'Ordre
des Arts et des Lettres, 1997 Ambassador Book Award, 1998 Medal for
Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book
Foundation, 2003 National Humanities Medal, 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for
Fiction, 2005 Man Booker International Prize nominee, 2006 Rea Award for the
Short Story, 2007 American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction, 2008
Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award, 2008 Jefferson
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