John Updike (1932 - 2009)

John Updike, one of the most celebrated authors in American literary history, as admired for his poetry, essays and criticism as for his novels, memoirs and short stories, died this morning of lung cancer at the age of 76. As a New York Times obituary by Christopher Lehman-Haupt notes, while Updike’s protean prose and wide-ranging intellect led many to compare him to Henry James or Edmund Wilson, they wrote of elitisms while Updike’s interests were more middle-class. “My subject is the American Protestant small town middle class,” Updike once told Life magazine. “I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.” An AP wire story by Hillel Italie notes, “He released more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s, winning virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and two National Book Awards.” There is one award Updike never won, though — the Nobel … although, as Italie notes, “he did bestow it upon one of his fictional characters, Henry Bech, the womanizing, egotistical Jewish novelist who collected the literature prize in 1999.”

• Updike disussed that book and others in this 2005 interview on C-SPAN TV

• The Guardian features a wonderful slide show of Updike throughout his career here.

• In a beautiful essay for the AARP magazine just last month, Updike wrote about aging as a writer: “An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while. The pleasures, for him, of book-making—the first flush of inspiration, the patient months of research and plotting, the laser-printed final draft, the back-and-forthing with Big Apple publishers, the sample pages, the jacket sketches, the proofs, and at last the boxes from the printer’s, with their sweet heft and smell of binding glue—remain, and retain creation’s giddy bliss. Among those diminishing neurons there lurks the irrational hope that the last book might be the best.