About John Updike
John Updike (born on March 18, 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania and died on January 27, 2009 in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts) grew up in Shillington, Pennsylvania, where his father was a teacher and his mother a writer. After receiving a B.A. degree in 1954 from Harvard, where he edited the Harvard Lampoon (for which he both wrote and drew), he studied drawing at Oxford for a year, but an offer from The New Yorker brought him back to the United States. He was hired as a reporter for the magazine but soon began contributing poetry, essays, and fiction. After achieving international notoriety with his novel The Centaur in 1963 (National Book Award), he met with great public and critical success with his tetralogy on the character of Harry Rabbit Angstrom: Heart of a hare, Rabbit caught up, Rabbit is rich and Rabbit at peace, these last two volumes having each received the Pulitzer Prize. John Updike is the author of twenty-six novels and hundreds of short stories, chronicles and poems, works published in particular regularly in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and which gave rise to several collections. It depicts small-town, Protestant, and middle-class America, and gives recurrent prominence to the universal themes of sex, faith, death, and their intertwining. His abundant and varied work, although often considered as uneven, earned John Updike to be considered one of the most important American writers of the 20th century. In 1957 he left The New Yorker in order to write independently full time, though his stories and book reviews still appear regularly in it.Perhaps the least known part of his work, John Updike's poetry deals with the same important themes as his novels, such as childhood, religion or death. Although this production has been constant and important since 1953, and certain poems have enjoyed undeniable success, such as Ex-Basketball Player (1957), Updike's poetry is considered to lean towards light poetry, by his own admission.
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