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Author John Updike Dies at Age 76
NEW YORK - U.S. author John Updike, a leading writer of his generation who chronicled the emotional drama of American small town life with searing wit, died on Tuesday, his publisher said.
Author John Updike has died of lung cancer. (Jones/AP) "It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning at the age of 76, after a battle with lung cancer." said Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A. Knopf, a unit of Random House.
"He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed."
Latimer said Updike died in a hospice in Massachusetts.
Known for exploring themes of sexual tension, and spiritual and moral angst in small town settings, Updike's "Rabbit is Rich," published in 1981, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
A decade later, his "Rabbit at Rest" won a second Pulitzer Prize.
Updike was also a poet and short-story writer and essayist.
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike studied English at Harvard University, where he contributed to, and later edited, the satirical Harvard Lampoon Magazine. He later joined the writing staff of the New Yorker magazine.
Reporting by Michelle Nichols, Editing by Frances Kerry
9 Comments so far
Show AllRabbit RIP. I love you John Updike.
from foreign perspective; our mind is colorless and i remember him free from the media pass time paranoia.edweg
John Updike did a lot more than just chronicle the emotional drama of American small town life. He was prolific, and ventured into a lot of non-American, non-white, non-middle class values areas. For a sample of a work in this latter category, try one of Updike's less renown books of fiction entitled "The Coup", which deals with the clash of Islam and western cultural diversity from the narrative perspective of a young Muslim man who experiences the travails of having three wives - an dark skinned African, a European, and a stereotypic American blonde.
Some critics dumped on John Updike for not being literary high brow enough. Others (depending on the currents of the culture wars) accused him of being sexist and/or habitually elitist in perspective. My favorite Updike books include "The Witches of Eastwick", "Couples", and one of his last, most recent novels entitled "Villages." Each deals with the common theme of sexual infidelity, wrapped up and playing out within the pretensions and hypocrisies of monogamous marriage in the lower, middle, and upper socioeconomic classes American society during the latter half of the 20th Century.
"Villages" in particular is well worth a read. The narrator is definitely politically progressive, but most of the characters are not. It is a young-man-coming-of-age in the 40's and 50's story that follows its central character (a computer geek entrepreneur) through the next five decades' turmoil into his retirement dotage. Along the way, our hero leaves a chum line of broken hearts and wrecked marriages in his wake, continually pondering (and ultimately coming close to answering) the timeless question "Why do men and women fall in love, and so often end up hurting each other"? In each successive decade, the influence of America's wars abroad, technological innovation, and the economic engine of the military-industrial complex subtly shapes the novel's plot line.
This focus upon serial sexual infidelity and/or outright promiscuity explains both the commercial success of much of Updike's fiction, and also generated the frequent critique that Updike's brilliant prose style and writing skills were being somewhat wasted on subject matters too pedestrian. Discourses on the existence of God, the meaning of life, fear of death, racism, class envy, and so forth are certainly to be found in his writing, but usually these issues are peripheral to the central dynamic of men and women, discovering one another, relating to one another, and making the world go around. I confess that I am personally drawn to that very world view.
John Updike was one of my very favorite authors. His death is a great loss to contemporary American literature.
Bill from Saginaw
Thank you very much for this. Your contributions are always worth reading and your perspective always intelligent and informative.
Another great one. Thank you for sharing your love of Updike; I'm going to check out those books you mention.
Warmest condolences to his family and friends - he was a wonderful writer, and I am glad I had the chance to read his work.
Happy trails, John Updike.
This and other obits strikingly fail to mention Updike's last freestanding novel "Terrorist" (2006).
'People'-mag. is quoted on the blurb as calling it:
"A chilling tale that is perhaps the most essential novel to emerge from Sept. 11".
Criticism of the falsely named "War on Terror" is still - post-Bush - downplayed and shunted aside in mainstream discourse.
So it goes.
To read again the early stories, published just a few years ago in a single volume, was to get a glimpse of the beauty of his writing. Almost every one had a sentence or two of luminescent prose, so startlingly graceful and fine they just made you gasp with pleasure. And the Bech books! I just loved the one in which Bech pushed one of his critics into the path of a subway train. Updike could be so mordantly funny.
Too bad he never won a Nobel. He deserved it.
John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?
by David Foster Wallace | 7:00 PM October 12, 1997
http://www.observer.com/node/39731
Some of the more nasty stuff:
"The scion of artless writing has died, deep into old age."
"Just a penis with a thesaurus."
"Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?"
"Makes misogyny seem literary the same way Limbaugh makes fascism seem funny."