Author John (Hoyer) Updike died 27 January 2009 of lung cancer near his home in Massachusetts. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on 18 March 1932, he was perhaps best known for his Rabbit quartet of novels—Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1991)—which follow the life of Harry Rabbit Angstrom, high school basketball star, car salesman, householder, and errant husband through the sociological upheavals of the world.
Updike wrote far and wide: novels, essays, short stories, literary criticism, and poetry. Much of his short fiction first appeared in The New Yorker (which also published stories by his mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike). His first sale, the story “Friends from Philadelphia” was to The New Yorker the summer he graduated from college.
As a child, he first thought of a career as either an animator or a magazine cartoonist, but summer jobs as a copyboy for The Reading Eagle (for which he also wrote several articles), seems to have pushed him into the literary career, which he loved. The New York Times quotes an Updike essay in which he explains his why he loved his career, and indeed, why any other writer would: “From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one’s memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.”
Updike graduated from Harvard in 1954 with a degree in English, but still thought of art, and won a Knox Fellowship at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford. Between 1954 and 1959, Updike published more than a hundred essays, articles, poems, and short stories in The New Yorker. He also had his first three books published in those years, all by Alfred A. Knopf, which would be his publisher throughout his entire career. Those books were The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (a poetry collection), The Poorhouse Fair (a novel), and The Same Door (a short story collection).
Updike’s genre (and genre-ish) novels include The Coup (1978, set in an imaginary African country), The Witches of Eastwick (1984, it was made into a film of the same name with Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer), its sequel The Widows of Eastwick (published in October 2008), Toward the End of Time (1997, set in the year 2020 after a war between the US and China), and The Terrorist (2006, about an Islamic terrorist who tries to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel).
He married Mary Entwistle Pennington in 1953, and they had four children by 1960. The Updikes separated in 1974 and divorced in 1976. In 1977, he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard (who had three children of her own). Updike is survived by his second wife, his four children (sons David and Michael, and daughters Miranda and Elizabeth), his three stepsons (John, Jason, and Frederic Bernhard), seven grandchildren, and seven step-grandchildren.
Among his awards were a Guggenheim Fellowship (1959), the National Book Award (1963), the National Book Critics Circle Award (1981 and 1984) , the Pulitzer Prize (1982 and 1991), the National Medal of Arts (1989), the Caldecott Medal (2000), the National Medal for the Humanities (2003), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2004). This page has a bibliography of his works; a different version is on his Wikipedia page.
Rather than reprinting what others have said, we point you at this lengthy obituary in the New York Times and Michiko Kakutani’s lengthy appraisal of his writings and career in the same paper. And The Centuarian, a web site dedicated to Updike and his works, has been online for 13 years.