John Updike

Novelist, Author

1932 – 2009

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Who was John Updike?

John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.

Updike's most famous work is his Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom series, which chronicles Rabbit's life over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to his death. Both Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit At Rest received the Pulitzer Prize. Updike is one of only three authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. 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.

Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike was well recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolificity. He wrote on average a book a year. Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity." 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 a significant amount of critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered to be one of the great American writers of his time. 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 extravagantly describes the physical world, while remaining squarely in the realist tradition. He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due."

Famous Quotes:

  • Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
  • I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
  • To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
  • A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
  • I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
  • Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
  • Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.
  • Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
  • Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them.
  • The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

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Born
Mar 18, 1932
Reading
Also known as
  • John Hoyer Updike
  • Updike, John
Parents
Spouses
Children
Religion
  • Anglicanism
Ethnicity
  • White American
Nationality
  • United States of America
Profession
Education
  • Harvard University
    English Language
    ( - 1954)
  • Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art
    (1954 - )
  • Harvard College
  • Governor Mifflin Senior High School
Lived in
  • Reading
  • Pennsylvania
  • Beverly Farms
  • Oxford
  • Ipswich
  • Cambridge
Died
Jan 27, 2009
Danvers

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

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"John Updike." Biographies.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 19 Mar. 2024. <https://www.biographies.net/people/en/john_updike>.

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