John Updike
John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and Colson Whitehead), Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike
March 18, 1932
Reading, Pennsylvania, U.S.
January 27, 2009 (aged 76)
Danvers, Massachusetts, U.S.
- Novelist
- short-story writer
- poet
- literary critic
- artist
Rabbit Angstrom novels: Rabbit, Run (1960)
Rabbit Redux (1971)
Rabbit is Rich (1981)
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
Henry Bech stories
The Witches of Eastwick
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. His 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 awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class", critics recognized his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific output – a book a year on average. Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity".[2]
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 significant critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered one of the great American writers of his time.[3] 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 describes the physical world extravagantly while remaining squarely in the realist tradition".[4] He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due".[5]
Career as a writer[edit]
1950s[edit]
Updike stayed at The New Yorker as a full staff writer for only two years, writing "Talk of the Town" columns and submitting poetry and short stories to the magazine. In New York, Updike wrote the poems and stories that came to fill his early books like The Carpentered Hen (1958) and The Same Door (1959). These works were influenced by Updike's early engagement with The New Yorker.[8] This early work also featured the influence of J. D. Salinger ("A&P"); John Cheever ("Snowing in Greenwich Village"); and the Modernists Marcel Proust, Henry Green, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov.[8]
During this time, Updike underwent a profound spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss of religious faith, he began reading Søren Kierkegaard and the theologian Karl Barth. Both deeply influenced his own religious beliefs, which in turn figured prominently in his fiction.[8] He believed in Christianity for the remainder of his life. Updike said, "As to critics, it seems to be my fate to disappoint my theological friends by not being Christian enough, while I'm too Christian for Harold Bloom's blessing. So be it."[13][14][15]
1960s–1970s[edit]
Later, Updike and his family relocated to Ipswich, Massachusetts. Many commentators, including a columnist in the local Ipswich Chronicle, asserted that the fictional town of Tarbox in Couples was based on Ipswich. Updike denied the suggestion in a letter to the paper.[16] Impressions of Updike's day-to-day life in Ipswich during the 1960s and 1970s are included in a letter to the same paper published soon after Updike's death and written by a friend and contemporary.[17] In Ipswich, Updike wrote Rabbit, Run (1960), on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and The Centaur (1963), two of his most acclaimed and famous works; the latter won the National Book Award.[18]
Rabbit, Run featured Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a former high school basketball star and middle-class paragon who would become Updike's most enduring and critically acclaimed character. Updike wrote three additional novels about him. Rabbit, Run was featured in Time's All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels.[19]
Short stories[edit]
Updike's career and reputation were nurtured and expanded by his long association with The New Yorker, which published him frequently throughout his career, despite the fact that he had departed the magazine's employment after only two years. Updike's memoir indicates that he stayed in his "corner of New England to give its domestic news" with a focus on the American home from the point of view of a male writer.[20] Updike's contract with the magazine gave it right of first offer for his short-story manuscripts, but William Shawn, The New Yorker's editor from 1952 to 1987, rejected several as too explicit.[21][22][23]
The Maple short stories, collected in Too Far To Go (1979), reflected the ebb and flow of Updike's first marriage; "Separating" (1974) and "Here Come the Maples" (1976) related to his divorce. These stories also reflect the role of alcohol in 1970s America.[24] They were the basis for the television movie also called Too Far To Go, broadcast by NBC in 1979.
Updike's short stories were collected in several volumes published by Alfred A. Knopf over five decades. In 2013, the Library of America issued a two-volume boxed edition of 186 stories under the title The Collected Stories.[25]
Novels[edit]
In 1971, Updike published a sequel to Rabbit, Run called Rabbit Redux, his response to the 1960s; Rabbit reflected much of Updike's resentment and hostility towards the social and political changes that beset the United States during that time.[26]
Updike's early Olinger period was set in the Pennsylvania of his youth; it ended around 1965 with the lyrical Of the Farm.
After his early novels, Updike became most famous for his chronicling infidelity, adultery, and marital unrest, especially in suburban America; and for his controversial depiction of the confusion and freedom inherent in this breakdown of social mores.
[27] He once wrote that it was "a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me". The most prominent of Updike's novels of this vein is Couples (1968), a novel about adultery in a small fictional Massachusetts town called Tarbox. It garnered Updike an appearance on the cover of Time magazine with the headline "The Adulterous Society". Both the magazine article and, to an extent, the novel struck a chord of national concern over whether American society was abandoning all social standards of conduct in sexual matters.
The Coup (1978), a lauded[28] novel about an African dictatorship inspired by a visit he made to Africa, found Updike working in new territory.
Personal life and death[edit]
Biographer Adam Begley wrote that Updike "transmuted the minutiae of his life" in prose, which enriched his readers at the cost of being "willing to sacrifice the happiness of people around him for his art".[41]
In 1953, while a student at Harvard, Updike married Mary Entwistle Pennington, an art student at Radcliffe College and daughter of a prominent Unitarian minister.[42] She accompanied him to Oxford, England, where she attended art school and their first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1955. The couple had three more children together: David (born 1957), Michael (born 1959), and Miranda (born 1960).
Updike was serially unfaithful, and eventually left the marriage in 1974 for Martha Ruggles Bernhard.[42] In 1977, Updike and Bernhard married. In 1982, his first wife married an MIT academic. Updike and Bernhard lived for more than 30 years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Updike had three stepsons through Bernhard.[43] He died of lung cancer at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009, at age 76.[44][45] He was survived by seven grandchildren and seven step-grandchildren.[43]
Poetry[edit]
Updike published eight volumes of poetry over his career, including his first book The Carpentered Hen (1958), and one of his last, the posthumous Endpoint (2009). The New Yorker published excerpts of Endpoint in its March 16, 2009 issue. Much of Updike's poetical output was recollected in Knopf's Collected Poems (1993). He wrote that "I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the strictness and liveliness of the lesser form."[46] The poet Thomas M. Disch noted that because Updike was such a well-known novelist, his poetry "could be mistaken as a hobby or a foible"; Disch saw Updike's light verse instead as a poetry of "epigrammatical lucidity".[47] His poetry has been praised for its engagement with "a variety of forms and topics", its "wit and precision", and for its depiction of topics familiar to American readers.[46]
British poet Gavin Ewart praised Updike for the metaphysical quality of his poetry and for his ability "to make the ordinary seem strange", and called him one of the few modern novelists capable of writing good poetry.[48] Reading Endpoint aloud, the critic Charles McGrath claimed that he found "another, deeper music" in Updike's poetry, finding that Updike's wordplay "smooths and elides itself" and has many subtle "sound effects".[49] John Keenan, who praised the collection Endpoint as "beautiful and poignant", noted that his poetry's engagement with "the everyday world in a technically accomplished manner seems to count against him".[50]