John Updike (1932 to 2009) was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet and critic, best known for the Rabbit novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. He published more than 20 novels and more than a dozen story collections, and is one of only four writers to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once.
Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on 18 March 1932 and grew up in the nearby town of Shillington, later moving to Plowville. He won a full scholarship to Harvard, where he was president of The Harvard Lampoon, and graduated in 1954 with a degree in English. He then attended the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford, hoping to become a cartoonist. Back in the United States he joined The New Yorker, staying as a staff writer for only two years, although the magazine went on publishing his stories, poems and reviews for the rest of his life.
His first novel, “The Poorhouse Fair”, appeared in 1959. “Rabbit, Run” (1960) introduced Angstrom, a former high school basketball star, and Updike returned to him in “Rabbit Redux” (1971), “Rabbit Is Rich” (1981) and “Rabbit at Rest” (1990), then in the novella “Rabbit Remembered”. “Rabbit Is Rich” won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and “Rabbit at Rest” won a second Pulitzer. “The Centaur” (1963) also won the National Book Award.
Updike liked working in series. Three books of linked stories follow the novelist Henry Bech, and “A Month of Sundays”, “Roger’s Version” and “S.” rework Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”. “Couples” (1968), about adultery in a Massachusetts town, put him on the cover of Time. “The Witches of Eastwick” (1984) was filmed in 1987 with Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer, and its sequel, “The Widows of Eastwick” (2008), was his last novel. The Maples stories, collected in “Too Far to Go”, became an NBC television film in 1979.
He married Mary Pennington in 1953 and had four children. After their divorce he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard in 1977, and they lived for more than 30 years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Updike died of lung cancer on 27 January 2009, aged 76. Books published after his death include “My Father’s Tears and Other Stories”, the poetry collection “Endpoint” and a volume of selected letters in 2025.
