John Updike

John Updike (1932-2009) was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He studied at Harvard and the Ruskin School of Fine Art in Oxford, England. From 1955 to 1957, he was a contributor to "The New Yorker," where he published short stories, poems, and book reviews. After 1957, he settled permanently in Massachusetts. Updike became known as the chronicler of the everyday American middle class with his novel "Rabbit, Run" in 1960, featuring the character Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, a 26-year-old former high school basketball player, and his attempts to escape a conventional marriage and the routine of an unfulfilling job. The same character appears in the subsequent books of the tetralogy, "Rabbit Redux" (1971), "Rabbit is Rich" (1981), "Rabbit at Rest" (1990), and "Rabbit Remembered" (2001), with the second and third books winning the Pulitzer Prize. Updike published more than sixty books in total, including twenty-eight novels—the last being "Terrorist" in 2006—fourteen short story collections, ten books of essays and personal writings, and ten poetry collections. His novels received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, American Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award. His novel "The Witches of Eastwick" (1984) was adapted into a film by George Miller in 1987, starring Jack Nicholson, Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon, and was also adapted into a stage musical. He passed away in Danvers, Massachusetts, in January 2009, at the age of 76, after battling lung cancer.