John Updike

American · 1932 to 2009

Born John Hoyer Updike on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pennsylvania, to a high school mathematics teacher and a mother who kept a typewriter on the kitchen table and submitted stories to the New Yorker in brown envelopes that came back unopened, he was an only child raised in the small town of Shillington and the unincorporated village of Plowville. He suffered from psoriasis and a stammer he never lost. Co-valedictorian of his high school class, he took a full scholarship to Harvard in 1950, edited the Lampoon, and graduated summa cum laude in 1954. A year at the Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford intended for cartoon training was followed by the staff of the New Yorker, where he wrote Talk of the Town pieces for two years before resigning to write fiction full-time from Ipswich, Massachusetts. His chronicle of the small-town American middle class became one of the longest in twentieth-century literature: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990) followed the former high school basketball star Harry Angstrom from twenty-six to retirement and death over four Pennsylvania decades, the last two volumes winning Pulitzers. He wrote a book a year on average for fifty years, including the Bech novels, the Maples stories, art and literary criticism for the New York Review, twenty-eight novels in all, and the line he used to describe his ambition: to give the mundane its beautiful due. He died of lung cancer at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009, at seventy-six, still writing the morning he was admitted.