John Updike

John Hoyer Updike (1932–2009) was born on 18 March 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the small town of Shillington — the “Olinger” of his early stories. He studied at Harvard and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, then joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he published fiction, poetry, and criticism for the rest of his life. He settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1957.

Life and Career

Updike was extraordinarily prolific: over sixty books, including twenty-three novels, numerous short-story collections, volumes of poetry, art criticism, and literary essays. His productivity was matched by consistent quality. He published his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, in 1959; his last, The Widows of Eastwick, in 2008, the year before his death.

The Rabbit novels are his central achievement. Rabbit, Run (1960) introduced Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom — a former high-school basketball star trapped in a stifling marriage in a small Pennsylvania town — who runs from his responsibilities with a recklessness that is both sympathetic and appalling. Rabbit Redux (1971) brought Angstrom into the upheavals of the late 1960s — Vietnam, the counterculture, racial tension. Rabbit Is Rich (1981) follows him into middle-aged prosperity, running a Toyota dealership during the oil crisis. Rabbit at Rest (1990) takes him to Florida, retirement, and death.

The tetralogy’s achievement is to have used one ordinary American man as a seismograph for the changes in American society over four decades. Angstrom is not admirable — he is selfish, unfaithful, often cruel — but he is rendered with such precision and sympathy that he becomes representative.

Beyond the Rabbit novels, Updike’s achievement includes The Centaur (1963, National Book Award), Couples (1968, a bestselling novel about suburban adultery), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), and dozens of masterly short stories.

Major Works and Themes

Updike’s great subject was middle-class American life — its domestic arrangements, its sexual anxieties, its religious longings, its material comforts. He wrote about suburban adultery, small-town protestantism, the American male body, and the relationship between sexual desire and spiritual yearning with a frankness and precision that were controversial in his time.

His prose style is one of the glories of American English — lyrical, sensuous, exact, capable of extraordinary descriptive passages. He could describe a gas station or a supermarket with the same attentiveness that Keats brought to an urn.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Updike was one of the most honoured American writers of his time — two Pulitzers, a National Book Award, the National Medal of Arts, the National Humanities Medal. His reputation has undergone some revision since his death, with feminist critics pointing to the limitations of his treatment of women characters, but his prose style and the Rabbit tetralogy remain beyond serious dispute.

Key Works

• Rabbit, Run (1960)
• The Centaur (1963) — National Book Award
• Couples (1968)
• Rabbit Is Rich (1981) — Pulitzer Prize
• Rabbit at Rest (1990) — Pulitzer Prize
• In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)

Collecting Updike

Updike is extensively collected, and his bibliography is large.

The Poorhouse Fair (1959, Alfred A. Knopf) — the debut — brings $100–$400. First issue copies (with the names in the colophon listing misspelled) are preferred.

Rabbit, Run (1960, Knopf) brings $200–$800 for fine copies in dust jacket.

Couples (1968, Knopf) — the bestseller — is common: $20–$60.

Rabbit Is Rich (1981, Knopf) and Rabbit at Rest (1990, Knopf) bring $30–$100 each.

Updike signed extensively at book events and was a generous correspondent. Signed copies are relatively available but increasingly collected. Limited editions from Lord John Press, Albondocani Press, and others form a substantial secondary bibliography. Knopf first editions are the standard collected form for all major novels.