john updike biography

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John Updike Biography

Born: March 18, 1932 Shillington, Pennsylvania American author and poet

Author John Updike mirrored his America in poems, short stories, essays, and novels, especially the four-volume "Rabbit" series.

John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. His father, Wesley, was a high school mathematics teacher, the model for several sympathetic father figures in Updike's early works. Because Updike's mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, had literary dreams of her own, books were a large part of the boy's early life. A sickly child, Updike turned to reading and art as an escape. In high school, he worked on the school newspaper and excelled in academics and upon graduation was admitted into Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Updike returned to the United States in 1955 and took a job as a staff writer at the New Yorker at the invitation of famed editor E. B. White (1899–1985), achieving a lifelong goal. But after two years and many "Talk of the Town" columns, he left New York City for Ipswich, Massachusetts, to devote himself full time to his own writing.

Twenty years of poetry

Updike began his remarkable career as a poet in 1958 by publishing his first volume, a collection of poems titled The Carpentered Hen. It is a book of light, amusing verse in the style of Ogden Nash (1902–1971) and Robert Service (1874–1958). The poetry possesses several styles shared by his fiction: careful attention to the sounds of words and of their meanings, the use of popular culture by identifying objects by familiar brand names, and the imitation of the popular press through advertising language.

Updike's output of light verse diminished with the publication of each succeeding volume of poems. His poetry has been collected in several volumes, among them Telephone Poles and Other Poems (1963); Midpoint (1969), which is a personal look at the midpoint of his life; and Tossing and Turning (1977), which some critics consider his finest collection of verse.

The "Rabbit" series and other novels

Although Updike's reputation rests on his complete body of work, he was first established as a major American writer upon the publication of his novel Rabbit Run (1960)—although at that date no one could have predicted the rich series of novels that would follow. It chronicled the life of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, creating as memorable an American character as any that appeared in the twentieth century. Harry Angstrom's life peaked in high school where he was admired as a superb basketball player. But by the age of twenty-six he is washed up in a dead-end job, demonstrating gadgets in a dime store, living a disappointed and constricted life. His natural reaction to this problem is to "run" (as would his namesake). And he runs, fleeing his wife and family as though the salvation of his soul depends upon it. The climax of Rabbit's search results in tragedy, but it is to the credit of Updike's skill that great sympathy for a dislikable character is brought forth from readers.

The second novel in the series, Rabbit Redux (1971), takes up the story of Harry Angstrom ten years later at the age of thirty-six. Updike continues Rabbit's story against a background of current events. The novel begins on the day of the moon shot, when the first human walked on the moon. It is the late 1960s and the optimism of American technology is countered by the sour feelings towards race riots, antiwar protests, and the drug culture. His family is falling apart, mirroring the problems of the country at large. Rabbit finally overcomes his dismal situation and brings "outsiders" into his home, attempting to recreate his family.

The next book in the series is Rabbit Is Rich (1981), which won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. Rabbit is forty-six and finally successful, selling Japanese fuel-efficient cars during the time of the oil crisis in the 1970s. In this novel Rabbit's son Nelson's failure becomes the counterweight to Rabbit's success.

Rabbit at Rest (1990) brings Rabbit into the 1980s to confront an even grimmer set of problems: acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS; an incurable disease that attacks the immune system), cocaine addiction, and terrorism. Rabbit suffers a heart attack and is haunted by ghosts of his past. Death looms ever larger. In these four novels an insignificant life presses and insists itself upon our consciousness, and we realize that this life has become the story of our common American experience recorded over three decades.

Other works

Updike wrote many other major novels, including The Centaur (1963), Couples (1965), A Month of Sundays (1975), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), Brazil (1993), and Bech at Bay (1998). Updike was also the author of several volumes of short stories, among them Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Music School (1966), Bech: A Book (1970), Museums and Women (1972), and Bech Is Back (1982).

In 1999 Updike published More Matter: Essays and Criticism, a collection of occasional pieces, reviews, speeches, and some personal reflection. On February 27, 2000, his novel Gertrude and Claudius was published by Knopf. The book was based on William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) play Hamlet .

Updike has been honored throughout his career: twice he received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He also received the American Book Award and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Updike has been one of the most productive American authors of his time, leading even his most dedicated fans to confess, as Sean French did in New Statesman and Society, "Updike can write faster than I can read."

For More Information

Bloom, Harold, ed. John Updike. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 1987.

De Bellis, Jack. The John Updike Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998.

Updike, John. Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1989.

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John Updike (March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer who brought the neuroses and the shifting sexual mores of the American middle class to the fore. He published more than 20 novels, a dozen collections of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Updike was one of only three writers to win the Pulitzer-Prize for Fiction twice.

Fast Facts: John Updike

• Full Name: John Hoyer Updike
• Known For : Pulitzer Prize winning American writer whose fiction explored the tensions of the American middle class, sexuality, and religion
• Born : March 18, 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania
• Parents : Wesley Russell Updike, Linda Updike (née Hoyer)
• Died : January 27, 2009 in Danvers, Massachusetts 
• Education : Harvard University
• Notable Works: The Rabbit Saga (1960, 1971, 1981, 1990), The Centaur (1963), Couples (1968), Bech, A Book (1970), The Witches of Eastwick (1984)
• Awards and Honors: Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction (1982, 1991); two National Book Awards (1964, 1982); 1989 National Medal of Arts; 2003 National Humanities Medal; Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement; 2008 Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. government's highest humanities honor
• Spouses: Mary Pennington, Martha Ruggles Bernhard
• Children: Elizabeth, David, Michael, and Miranda Margaret

John Hoyer Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 1932, to Wesley Russell and Linda Updike, née Hoyer. He was an eleventh generation American, and his family spent his childhood in Shillington, Pennsylvania, living with Linda’s parents. Shillington served as a base for his fictional town of Olinger, the embodiment of suburbia. 

Aged six, he started cartooning, and in 1941 he took drawing and painting lessons. In 1944, his paternal aunt gave the Updikes a subscription to The New Yorker, and cartoonist James Thurber gave him one of his dog drawings, which Updike kept in his study as a talisman his whole life.

Updike published his first story, “A Handshake with the Congressman,” in the February 16, 1945 edition of his high school publication Chatterbox. That same year, his family relocated to a farmhouse in the nearby town of Plowville. “Whatever creative or literary aspects I had were developed out of sheer boredom those two years before I got my driver’s license,” was how he described these early teenage years. In high school, he was known as “the sage” and as someone who “hopes to write for a living.” By the time he graduated high school in 1950 as president and co-valedictorian, he had contributed 285 items, between articles, drawings, and poems, to the Chatterbox. He enrolled in Harvard on a tuition scholarship, and while there he revered the Harvard Lampoon, for which he produced more than 40 poems and drawings in his first year alone.

Early Work and Breakthrough (1951-1960)

• The Poorhouse Fair (1959)
• Rabbit, Run (1960)

Short Stories:  

• The Same Door

Updike's first prose work, “The Different One,” was published in the Harvard Lampoon in 1951. In 1953, he was named editor of the Harvard Lampoon, and novelist and professor Albert Guerard awarded him an A for a story on a former basketball player. That same year he married Mary Pennington, the daughter of a minister of the First Unitarian Church. In 1954, he graduated from Harvard with a thesis titled “Non-Horatian Elements in Robert Herrick’s Imitations and Echoes of Horace.” He won a Knox fellowship which enabled him to attend Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. While in Oxford, he met E. B. White and his wife Katharine White, who was fiction editor of the The New Yorker . She offered him a job and the magazine bought ten poems and four stories; his first story, “Friends from Philadelphia,” appears on the October 30, 1954 issue.

The year 1955 saw the birth of his daughter Elizabeth and his move to New York, where he took the role of “Talk of the Town” reporter for The New Yorker. He became “Talk Writer” for the magazine, which refers to a writer whose copy is ready for publication without revisions. After the birth of his second son, David, Updike left New York and relocated to Ipswich, Massachusetts.

In 1959, he published his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, and he started reading Søren Kierkegaard. He won a Guggenheim fellowship to support the writing of Rabbit, Run, which was published in 1960 by Knopf. It focused on the lackluster life and graphic sexual escapades of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high school football star stuck in a dead-end job. Updike had to make changes prior to publication in order to avoid possible lawsuits for obscenity.

Literary Stardom (1961-1989)

• The Centaur (1963)
• Of the Farm (1965)
• Couples (1968)
• Rabbit Redux (1971)
• A Month of Sundays (1975)
• Marry Me (1977)
• The Coup (1978)
• Rabbit Is Rich (1981)
• The Witches of Eastwick (1984)
• Roger's Version (1986)
• Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Short Stories and Collections:

• Pigeon Feathers (1962)
• Olinger Stories (a selection) (1964)
• The Music School (1966)
• Bech, a Book (1970)
• Museums and Women (1972)
• Problems and Other Stories (1979)
• Too Far to Go (the Maples stories) (1979)
• Your Lover Just Called (1980)
• Bech Is Back (1982)
• Trust Me (1987)

Non-Fiction:

• Assorted Prose (1965)
• Picked-Up Pieces ( 1975)
• Hugging The Shore (1983)
• Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989)
• Just Looking: Essays on Art (1989)
• Buchanan Dying (1974)

In 1962, Rabbit, Run was published in London by Deutsch, and he spent the fall of that year making “emendations and restorations” while living in Antibes. Revising the Rabbit saga would become a lifelong habit of his. “ Rabbit, Run , in keeping with its jittery, indecisive protagonist, exists in more forms than any other novel of mine,” he wrote in the The New York Times in 1995. Following the success of Rabbit, Run , he published the important memoir “The Dogwood Tree” in Martin Levin's Five Boyhoods.

His 1963 novel, The Centaur, was awarded the National Book Award and the French literary prize Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger . Between 1963 and 1964, he marched in a Civil Rights demonstration and travelled to Russia and Eastern Europe for the State Department in the US-USSR Cultural Exchange Program. In 1964, he was also elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, one of the youngest persons ever so honored.

In 1966, his short story “The Bulgarian Poetess,” published in his collection The Music School, won his first O. Henry Prize. In 1968, he published Couples, a novel where protestant sexual mores clash with the post-pill sexual liberation of the 1960s. Couples garnered so much praise that it landed Updike on the cover of Time.

In 1970, Updike published Rabbit Redux, the first sequel of Rabbit, Run, and received the Signet Society Medal for Achievement in the Arts. Parallel to Rabbit, he also created another mainstay in his character universe, Henry Bech, a Jewish bachelor who is a struggling writer. He first appeared in short story collections that would later be compiled in full-length books, namely Bech, A Book  (1970),  Bech Is Back  (1982), and  Bech at Bay  (1998).

After starting research on president James Buchanan in 1968, he finally published the play Buchanan Dying in 1974, which premiered at the Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on April 29, 1976. In 1974, he also separated from his wife Mary and, in 1977, married Martha Ruggles Bernhard.

In 1981, he published Rabbit Is Rich, the third volume of the Rabbit quartet. The following year, 1982, Rabbit Is Rich won him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award for Fiction, the three major American literary fiction prizes. “What Makes Rabbit Run,” a BBC documentary from 1981, featured Updike as its main subject, following him all over the East Coast as he fulfilled his writerly obligations.

In 1983, his collection of articles and reviews, Hugging the Shore , was published, which earned him the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism the following year. In 1984, he published The Witches of Eastwick, which was adapted in a 1987 film starring Susan Sarandon, Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jack Nicholson. The story deals with the concept of "being old" from the perspective of three women, which marked a departure from Updike’s previous work. On November 17, 1989, president George H. W. Bush awarded him the National Medal of Arts.

Rabbit at Rest, the final chapter of the Rabbit saga (1990), portrayed the protagonist in old age, struggling with poor health and poor finances. It earned him his second Pulitzer Prize, which is a rarity in the literary world.

Later Years and Death (1991—2009)

• Memories of the Ford Administration (a novel) (1992)
• Brazil (1994)
• In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)
• Toward the End of Time (1997)
• Gertrude and Claudius (2000)
• Seek My Face (2002)
• Villages (2004)
• Terrorist (2006)
• The Widows of Eastwick (2008)
• The Afterlife (1994)
• Bech at Bay (1998)
• The Complete Henry Bech (2001)
• Licks of Love (2001)
• The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2003)
• Three Trips (2003)
• My Father's Tears and Other Stories (2009)
• The Maples Stories (2009)
• Odd Jobs (1991)
• Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (1996)
• More Matter (1999)
• Still Looking: Essays on American Art (2005)
• In Love with a Wanton: Essays on Golf (2005)
• Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism (2007)

The 1990s were quite prolific for Updike, as he experimented with several genres. He published the essay collection Odd Jobs in 1991, the historical-fiction work Memories of the Ford Administration in 1992, the magical-realist novel Brazil in 1995, In the Beauty of the Lilies in 1996—which deals with cinema and religion in America—, the science fiction novel Toward the End of Time in 1997, and Gertrude and Claudius (2000) — a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  In 2006, he published the novel Terrorist, about a Muslim extremist in New Jersey.

Beyond his experimentation, during this period he also expanded his New England universe: his story collection Licks of Love (2000) includes the novella Rabbit Remembered. Villages (2004) centers on the middle-aged libertine Owen Mackenzie. In 2008, he also returned to Eastwick to explore what the heroines from his 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick were like during widowhood. This was his last published novel. He died the following year, on January 27, 2009. The cause, his publishing house Alfred Knopf reported, was lung cancer.

Literary Style and Themes 

Updike explored and analyzed the American middle class, seeking dramatic tension in everyday interactions such as marriage, sex, and dead-end job dissatisfaction. “My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class. I like middles,” he told Jane Howard in a 1966 interview for Life magazine. “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.” 

This ambiguity surfaces in the way he approached sex, as he advocated for taking “coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it on the continuum of human behavior,” in a 1967 interview with The Paris Review. His characters have an animalistic—rather than romanticized—view of sex and sexuality. He wanted to demystify sex, as the Puritanical legacy of America had harmfully mythologized it. Throughout the course his work, we see how his portrayal of sex mirrors the shifting sexual mores in America from the 1950s onwards: his early work has sexual favors parceled out carefully through marriage, while works such as Couples reflect the 1960s sexual revolution, and later works deal with the looming threat of AIDS.

Having been raised a Protestant, Updike prominently featured religion in his works, too, especially the traditional Protestant faith that is so characteristic of middle class America. In The Beauty of The Lilies (1996), he explores the decline of religion in America alongside the history of cinema, while the characters Rabbit and Piet Hanema are modeled after the readings of Kierkegaard he started undertaking in the mid 1955—the Lutheran philosopher examined the non-rational nature of life and mankind’s need for self-examination.

Unlike his average, middle-class characters, his prose displayed a rich, dense, and at times arcane vocabulary and syntax, fully expressed in his description of sex scenes and anatomy, which proved to be a turn-off for several readers. In later works, however, as he grew more experimental in genre and content, his prose became leaner. 

While he experimented with several literary genres including criticism, article writing, poetry, playwriting, and even genre fiction, Updike became a mainstay in the American literary canon for his observation of the sexual and personal neuroses of small town America. His most renowned antihero-type characters, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom and Henry Bech, embodied, respectively, the average post-war Protestant suburbanite and the struggling writer. 

• Bellis, Jack De.  The John Updike Encyclopedia . Greenwood Press, 2000.
• Olster, Stacey.  The Cambridge Companion to John Updike . Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Samuels, Charles Thomas. “John Updike, The Art of Fiction No. 43.”  The Paris Review , 12 June 2017, https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4219/john-updike-the-art-of-fiction-no-43-john-updike.
• Updike, John. “BOOKEND; Rabbit Gets It Together.”  The New York Times , The New York Times, 24 Sept. 1995, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/24/books/bookend-rabbit-gets-it-together.html.
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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section John Updike

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John Updike by James Schiff LAST REVIEWED: 21 March 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 11 January 2018 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0032

John Updike (b. 1932–d. 2009) was an immensely versatile and prolific writer who produced more than sixty volumes, including novels, short stories, literary and art criticism, poems, children’s books, a memoir, and a play. A distinguished “man of letters,” Updike excelled at not simply one genre but three: the novel, short fiction, and criticism. Widely praised for his facility with language, visual style, and lyric love of the surface world, Updike was capable of generating scenes and images of extraordinary beauty and freshness. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, he was educated in public schools in the nearby suburb of Shillington. Pushed toward a career in the arts by his mother, Linda, a homemaker who herself had ambitions of becoming a writer, he earned a tuition scholarship to Harvard. After Harvard and graduate study in drawing in Oxford (England), he was offered a job at the New Yorker , a magazine that he had worshiped ever since he was a boy. He and his young family spent two years in Manhattan but then left in 1957, moving to Ipswich, Massachusetts, a small town an hour north of Boston. Except for a year in London and two in Boston, he would spend the final fifty-two years of his life in small Massachusetts towns on the North Shore, composing at least one book each year. Throughout his life he maintained close ties with the New Yorker , publishing nearly eight hundred pieces (fiction, poetry, articles, reviews) in its pages. His best-known work is Rabbit Angstrom , a sequence of four novels and one novella, written at ten-year intervals between 1960 and 2000. The Rabbit books chronicle the life of everyman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, while also documenting the history of American culture over the second half of the 20th century. In all, Updike published twenty-three novels, including The Centaur , a mythical depiction of small-town Pennsylvania life; Couples , a sadly erotic tale of suburban adultery during the Kennedy era; The Coup , the memoirs of an exiled African dictator; and his Scarlet Letter trilogy of novels ( A Month of Sunday , Roger’s Version , and S .), which engage in intertextual dialogue with Hawthorne’s canonical novel. Updike was also heralded as a major writer of short fiction, publishing more than two hundred stories, including “A & P,” “Pigeon Feathers,” and “Separating.” Given his careful attention to depiction of the quotidian, some have argued that Updike’s talents were better suited to the short story. In addition, he published eleven volumes and more than five thousand pages of essays and criticism, establishing himself as the most significant critic and “man of letters” of his generation.

In spite of the abundance of critical commentary on Updike, no single study provides a comprehensive view of his entire oeuvre. Some of the best early studies— Detweiler 1984 , Greiner 1984 , Newman 1988 —were published mid-oeuvre and thus do not address, roughly speaking, Updike’s final thirty volumes. Later volumes, such as Schiff 1998 and Pritchard 2000 , are very good and comprehensive, dealing with the major works as well as Updike’s writings in several genres, yet these two studies, appearing roughly a decade before Updike’s death, do not deal with his final dozen books. Begley 2014 , a biography, addresses the entire life and career, though its focus is on the early works. All of these general overviews, along with Baker 1991 and Olster 2006 , are accessible.

Baker, Nicholson. U and I: A True Story . New York: Random House, 1991.

An unconventional, clever, and humorously engaging consideration of (and homage to) Updike and literary influence, written by a prominent novelist.

Begley, Adam. Updike . New York: HarperCollins, 2014.

First full-length biography. Provides an excellent introduction to the life and work. Focuses more attention on first half, prior to 1980, of Updike’s life and career, and is most interested in the short fiction.

Detweiler, Robert. John Updike . Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

One of the best early studies (first published in 1972) and later revised. Smart and accessible, Detweiler’s volume considers style, themes, structure, and motifs in the early fiction, from The Same Door (1959) through Bech Is Back (1982).

Greiner, Donald J. John Updike’s Novels . Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1984.

A good and immensely clear survey of Updike’s first ten novels and first Bech collection, by one of the earliest and finest Updike scholars. Avoiding a thesis approach, Greiner examines each novel through close reading and attention to the comments of reviewers and critics.

Newman, Judie. John Updike . New York: St. Martin’s, 1988.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-19260-1

An intelligent study by a leading British critic in American studies, covering the first eleven novels. Whereas many early critical studies of Updike stressed religious and philosophical concerns, Newman was one of the first, in a book-length manuscript, to explore political, cultural, sexual, and social themes.

Olster, Stacey, ed. The Cambridge Companion to John Updike . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521845327

Excellent, wide-ranging collection of essays dealing with literary style, race, religion, gender, history, film, popular culture, and postmodernism from such familiar Updike critics as Boswell, Greiner, Miller, Olster, Plath, Schiff, Vargo, and Verduin.

Pritchard, William H. Updike: America’s Man of Letters . South Royalton, VT: Steerforth, 2000.

An excellent and lucid introduction to the novels, stories, poetry, and criticism by a distinguished American critic. Pritchard is particularly adept as a close reader of sentences and language; he is also quite good in demonstrating how Updike’s oeuvre evolved over time.

Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited . New York: Twayne, 1998.

Provides an excellent introduction to Updike’s work, with readings of most of the major novels as well as chapters covering the literary criticism and most frequently anthologized stories.

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John Updike

Poet, essayist, short-story writer, critic, and novelist John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 1932. His father taught high school math, and his mother wrote short stories and novels. Updike received his BA from Harvard University in 1954, the year he began to publish in The New Yorker .

Thomas M. Disch wrote in Poetry magazine, "Updike enjoys such pre-eminence as a novelist that his poetry could be mistaken as a hobby or a foible," adding, "It is a poetry of civility—in its epigrammatical lucidity . . . and in its tone of vulgar bonhomie and good appetite." The Los Angeles Times noted that he "has earned an . . . imposing stance on the literary landscape . . . earning virtually every American literary award, repeated bestsellerdom and the near-royal status of the American author-celebrity."

Updike is the author of more than fifty books. Among his volumes of poetry are Americana and Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), Collected Poems 1953-1993 (1993), Facing Nature (1985), Tossing and Turning (1977), Seventy Poems (1972), Midpoint and Other Poems (1969), and The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958).

His novels and short-story collections include Toward the End of Time (1997), The Afterlife and Other Stories (1994), Problems and Other Stories (1981), Marry Me (1976), Rabbit Redux (1971), and Couples (1968).

Updike received numerous honors and awards including the National Book Award, American Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and a National Arts Club Medal of Honor. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for Rabbit is Rich and another Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for Rabbit at Rest .

John Updike died due to complications of lung cancer on January 27, 2009.

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