John Updike
Pulitzer Prize-winning author, John Updike died after a battle with lung caner. Updike was 76 years old.
Updike wrote about middle-class life on Main Street, USA. His novels looked at everyday relationships and took you through issues of sex, adultery and loss, in a way that only he could.
Updike authored more than 50 novels and volumes of short stories, poems, essays and criticism. Updike captured “the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America,” most notably in the four-book Rabbit series, which follows Everyman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom through the second half of the 20th century. He won the Pulitzer Prize for two novels in the tetralogy: “Rabbit Is Rich” (1981) and “Rabbit at Rest” (1990). He published his only No. 1 best seller with “Couples” in 1968. His 1984 “The Witches of Eastwick” became a movie starring Jack Nicholson, Cher and Susan Sarandon. The sequel, “The Widows of Eastwick,” was published in 2008.
He was ofter referred to as “the most brilliant and versatile writer of his generation.” He was called America’s greatest poetic novelist.
John was a 1954 Harvard Graduate. In addition to his wife Martha, survivors include four children from his first marriage: Elizabeth Pennington, David Hoyer, Michael John and Miranda, and three stepchildren.
One of my personal favorite lines from an Updike classic: “Men are all heart and Women are all body. I don’t know who has the brains. God maybe.” (Rabbit, Run)
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