The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Updike, John Hoyer
Updike, John
Hoyer
(
1932
–
), American novelist, short story writer, and poet, born in Pennsylvania (where his early works are set) and educated at Harvard. His novels include the tetralogy Rabbit, Run (
1960
), Rabbit Redux (
1971
), Rabbit is Rich (
1981
), and Rabbit at Rest (
1990
), a small-town domestic tragi-comedy which traces the career of ex-basketball champion
Harry
Angstrom
from the early days of his precarious (but, as it turns out, lasting) marriage to alcoholic Janice, through the social and sexual upheavals of the 1960s, to the compromises of middle age. The Centaur (
1963
) uses a mythological framework to explore the relationship of a schoolmaster father and his teenage son and Couples (
1968
) is a portrait of sexual passion and realignment amongst a group of young suburban married couples in Tarbox, Massachusetts, a town which in this and succeeding works takes...
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