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 John Updike Born on March 18, 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania, John Updike was the only child of a high school science teacher and a mother who aspired to be a writer. It was apparently she who instilled in young John the passion to write and draw. While a huge fan of humorist books and mysteries and prone to consuming them in mass quantities, Updike still managed to excel in school, becoming co-valedictorian of Shillington High and receiving a scholarship to attend Harvard. There he majored in English and wrote and drew for the Lampoon; his beginnings were thus principally in the mode of humor writing. Before graduating summa cum laude from Harvard, Updike married Mary A. Pellington, a student at Radcliffe, and in 1954, the year of his commencement, he sold a short story and a poem to The New Yorker. Updike moved with his wife to England to study at Oxford's Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, during which time Mary gave birth to their first daughter. When they returned to the States, they settled in New York City, where Updike landed a job as a staff writer for The New Yorker. In 1957, after the birth of a son, the family moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, the state in which Updike still lives. Maintaining ties with The New Yorker but resolving himself to write full-time, Updike began work on his first book of poetry, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, which was published by Harper and Brothers in 1958. Next came The Poorhouse Fair (1959), Updike's first novel, which was well-received and widely regarded to show true promise. He fulfilled that promise with his second novel, Rabbit, Run (1960), for which he turned to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., his publisher ever since. Rabbit, Run was a huge success, and Updike added further laurels to his crown with The Centaur, which won him the National Book Award in 1963. He was only thirty-one, and already one of the country's leading literary voices. In 1964, he was admitted to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; he remains the youngest person ever to have received this honor. His 1968 novel Couples inspired a Time cover story on the novelist, and the seventies witnessed both the creation of a new recurring protagonist, Henry Bech - in Bech: A Book (1970) - and the reappearance of Harry Angstrom in Rabbit Redux (1971). In 1974, Updike, long an activist on causes involving the Soviet Union, joined Arthur Miller, Richard Wilbur, and John Cheever in demanding that the Soviet government stop persecuting Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He divorced his wife Mary in 1976, and married Martha Ruggles Bernhard the following year. Subsequent works include Rabbit is Rich (1981), for which Updike won the Pulitzer Prize, Bech is Back (1982), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), Rabbit at Rest (1991), for which he received a second Pulitzer, and Gertrude and Claudius (2000), a prequel to Hamlet. His latest novel, Terrorist, was published in 2006. |
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