john updike

John Hoyer Updike was a writer from Reading ,PN(March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009).
he became well known for his rabbit series (the novels Rabbit, run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and the novella "Rabbit Remembered") wich he awarded the Pulitzer prize. JOhn regularly wrote for the New York Review of Books, and a few of his poems appeared in the New Yorker. later on in life, john moved with his family to Ipswich, Massachusetts.


In 1971, Updike published a sequel to Rabbit, Run called Rabbit Redux, his response to the 1960s; Rabbit reflected much of Updike's confusion and ambivalence towards the social and political changes that beset the United States during that time.[16] In 1980 he published another novel featuring that character, Rabbit Is Rich, which won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, all the three major American literary prizes. The novel found "Rabbit the fat and happy owner of a Toyota dealership."[10] Updike found it difficult to end the book, because he was "having so much fun" in the imaginary county Rabbit and his family inhabited.[16] In 1990, he published the last Rabbit novel, Rabbit At Rest, in which his main character died. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Over 500 pages long, the novel is among Updike's most celebrated. In 2000, Updike included the novella "Rabbit Remembered" in his collection Licks of Love, drawing a final close to the Rabbit saga. His Pulitzers for the two final Rabbit novels makes him one of only three writers to have won two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, the other two being William Faulkner and Booth Tarkington.
In 1995, Everyman's Library collected and canonized the four novels as the omnibus Rabbit Angstrom, for which Updike wrote an introduction in which he described Rabbit as "a ticket to the America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit's eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, though the difference was often slight."[17] Updike later called Rabbit "a brother to me, and a good friend. He opened me up as a writer."[18]
Updike's early Olinger period was set in the Pennsylvania of his youth; it ended around 1965 with the lyrical Of the Farm. Updike then became most famous as a "chronicler of suburban adultery."[19] He once wrote that it was "a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me." The most prominent of Updike's novels of this vein is Couples (1968), a novel about adultery in a small fictional Massachusetts town called Tarbox. It garnered Updike an appearance on the cover of Time magazine with the headline "The Adulterous Society."
The Maple short stories, collected in Too Far To Go (1979), reflected the ebb and flow of Updike's first marriage; "Separating" (1974) and "Here Come the Maples" (1976) related to Updike's divorce. Those stories were the basis for the television movie also called Too Far To Go which was broadcast by NBC. Two other novels from this period, A Month of Sundays (1975), the first in Updike's so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy, and Marry Me: A Romance (1976), are also meditations on suburban adultery.[10]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Updike