Giant of American Literature, John Updike, Dies
New Yorker Contributor, Witches of Eastwick Creator Mourned
Jan 27, 2009
Updike, who wrote more than 50 books including novels, short story collections, art appreciation and literary criticism in a 50-year career, died of lung cancer, according to a statement from his publisher.
A Massachusetts resident, Updike achieved his greatest fame for his books chronicling the life and death of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom: Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.
Updike, who saw himself as a literary novelist, often bemoaned what he saw as the degradation of taste in the reading public.
"Tastes have coarsened," he told Salon in 2002. "People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word. They're less comfortable with novels. They don't have a backward frame of reference that would enable them to appreciate things like irony and allusions. It's sad. It's momentarily uphill, I would say."
Pennsylvania Born
Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1932, capturing his childhood in the 1989 memoir, Self Consciousness. He went to Harvard on full scholarship, becoming president of the Harvard Lampoon.
Much of Updike's stories and criticism appeared in the page of The New Yorker.
In 1959, he published his first collection of short stories, The Poorhouse Fair, which was followed a year later by the first of the Rabbit novels.
Averaging nearly a book a year — the only years since 1958 that he did not publish a book were 1961, 1967, 1973, 1980 and 1995 — Updike rarely found a piece of writing that couldn't make an appearance between the covers of a book, putting out collections of short stories as well as anthologies of writings on art, golf and literary criticism, even including the text of photo captions he did for a project.
"Writing's gotten to be a habit," he told The New York Times in 1982.
While Updike would occasionally appear on the best seller lists, he never really gripped the popular imagination of the American public. The one exception being The Witches of Eastwick, which came out in 1987 starring Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer.
Updike bemoaned the creative liberties taken with filmmakers, talking of the trouble he had recognizing his novel in the movie.
In October 2008, he revisited the characters from the book, publishing The Widows of Eastwick, which got mixed reviews.
Prize-Winner
While Updike won many prizes during his career, he never won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Updike consoled himself with giving the prize in 1999 to Henry Bech, his fictional Jewish novelist he used in two books.
Updike's publisher, Alfred Knopf, has two short story collections by Updike planned for release later this year.
My Father's Tears and Other Stories, which the publisher describes as "in sum, the American experience from the Depression to the Aftermath of 9/11 finds reflection in these glittering pieces of observation, remembrance and imagination."
That is to be followed in August by The Maples Stories, a collection following one couple that Updike has written about since 1956 when he published the short story, "Snowing in Greenwich Village" in The New Yorker.
Seventeen of the eighteen stories in the collection were published in paperback in Too Far To Go.
Knopf says this will be their first appearance in hardcover.
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