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Apr 21, 2014 · John Updike moved with his wife, Mary, and their two children from New York City to Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1957. He had just turned twenty-five.
- Louis Menand
John Hoyer 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.
- Early Life
- Early Work and Breakthrough
- Literary Stardom
- Later Years and Death
- Literary Style and Themes
- Legacy
- Sources
John Hoyer Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 1932, 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. Aged s...
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. That same year he married Mary Pennington, the daughter of a minister of the First Unitarian Church. ...
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 Rabbitsaga 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 th...
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 fic...
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 am...
While he experimented with several literary genres including criticism, article writing, poetry, playwriting, and even genre fiction, Updike became a mainstay in the American literary canon for his observation of the sexual and personal neuroses of small town America. His most renowned antihero-type characters, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom and Henry Bec...
Bellis, Jack De. The John Updike Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press, 2000.Olster, Stacey. The Cambridge Companion to John Updike. Cambridge University Press, 2006.Samuels, Charles Thomas. “John Updike, The Art of Fiction No. 43.” The Paris Review, 12 June 2017, https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4219/john-updike-the-art-of-fiction-no-43-john-updike.Updike, John. “BOOKEND; Rabbit Gets It Together.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 24 Sept. 1995, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/24/books/bookend-rabbit-gets-it-together.html.- Angelica Frey
Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Linda Grace (née Hoyer) and Wesley Russell Updike, and was raised at his childhood home in the nearby small town of Shillington. [6] The family later moved to the unincorporated village of Plowville .
May 10, 2014 · That his first wife, Mary, tearfully insisted that their first child be born in hospital despite the 1950s NHS policy (they were living in Oxford at the time) of promoting home births; that...
Jan 28, 2009 · John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit novels highlighted a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism so vast, protean and lyrical as to place him in the...
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John Updike (born March 18, 1932, Reading, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died January 27, 2009, Danvers, Massachusetts) was an American writer of novels, short stories, and poetry, known for his careful craftsmanship and realistic but subtle depiction of “American, Protestant, small-town, middle-class” life.
