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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. Because Updike's mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, had literary dreams of her own, books were a large part of the boy's early life.
- Twain, Mark
His writings grew increasingly bitter, especially after his...
- Twain, Mark
Wesley Updike 1923 Ursinus yearbook photo Wesley Updike playing football at Ursinus College, ca. 1920s Wesley Russell Updike was born on February 22, 1900, in Trenton, New Jersey , to Virginia (Blackwood) Updike, a Missouri native, and Rev. Hartley Titus Updike, a Princeton educated Presbyterian minister, who suffered employment difficulties due to a throat ailment. [1]
- 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.Jan 27, 2009 · John Hoyer Updike. Born 18 Mar 1932 in Reading, Berks, Pennsylvania, United States. Ancestors. Son of Wesley Russell Updike and Linda Grace (Hoyer) Updike. [sibling (s) unknown] [spouse (s) unknown] [children unknown] Died 27 Jan 2009 at age 76 in Danvers, Essex, Massachusetts, United States. Problems/Questions Profile manager: Mark Burch [send ...
- March 18, 1932
- January 27, 2009
Jan 27, 2009 · Naomi Judd presenting the Golden Plate Award to John Updike at the 2004 International Achievement Summit. 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.
Sep 30, 2024 · Mathé’s introduction to John Updike came when she went to Oxford and studied “Puritanism in John Updike’s Fiction” with Jeanne-Marie Santraud, “who was the only Americanist at Paris IV.” She would go on to write her master’s thesis on Updike and compose a monograph for the American Voices series edited by Marc Chénetier titled John Updike: Nostalgia for America.
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Biography. John Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania, the only child of Wesley and Linda Grace (Hoyer) Updike. His early years were spent in the Shillington home of his ...
