John Updike

Introduction

John Updike

John Updike is always caught in the middle. Fortunately, that’s how he likes it. By his own admission, Updike has dedicated his career to depicting middle-class people in small-town America. A New England native, Updike’s dissection of Yankee wasps earned him early success and numerous literary awards. Later in life, Updike experimented outside that comfort zone, yielding mixed results and responses. These later works often take well-known stories and reinvent them or retell them from a new perspective. At its best, Updike’s writing celebrates America, even as it depicts the complexities of human relationships. In lesser efforts, Updike has been criticized as indulgent and simplistically self-satisfied. Still, his impressive body of work contains fiction and nonfiction, prose and poetry, short and long form, and children’s stories as well as grown-up sagas.

Essential Facts

1. Updike’s depiction of small-town America took a whimsical turn in his novel The Witches of Eastwick, later adapted as a film, a short-lived TV show, and a stage musical.
2. One of Updike’s best-beloved pieces of writing is an essay about legendary Boston Red Sox player Ted Williams called “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.”
3. A departure from his usual work, Updike’s 2000 novel Gertrude and Claudius is a prequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
4. Rabbit, Run, the first novel in Updike’s famous four-book series, caused a minor stir due to the graphic sexuality depicted in the book.
5. Updike, the critic, is not afraid of taking on fellow novelists, regardless of their reputation. He has traded words with the likes of Gore Vidal and Tom Wolfe.