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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
- 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
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]
Feb 2, 2024 · Updike married Mary E. Pennington in 1953 and in 1955, their first child Elizabeth was born. They had three more children, before they divorced in 1974. In 1977, he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard with whom he spent the rest of his life. He died of lung cancer at the age of 76. Trivia
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. Updike grew up in Shillington ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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 ...
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Jan 27, 2009 · John Updike was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. He originally intended to become a cartoonist, but his professional writing career after landing a position with The New Yorker. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1982 and in 1991. Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Linda Grace (née Hoyer) and ...
