Rabbit, Run established Updike as one of the major American novelists of his generation. In The New York Times he was praised for his “artful and supple” style in his “tender and discerning study of the desperate and the hungering in our midst.”[16] American novelist Joyce Carol Oates has written that Updike is “a master, like Flaubert, of mesmerizing us with his narrative voice even as he might repel us with the vanities of human desire his scalpel exposes.”
Updike himself said Rabbit, Run was the novel with which most people associate him, even though other novels in the series won Pulitzer Prizes.[17]
