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John (Hoyer) Updike (1932-2009) |
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American novelist, short story writer and poet, internationally known for his novels Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990). They follow the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a star athlete, from his youth through the social and sexual upheavals of the 1960s, to later periods of his life, and to final decline. John Updike's oeuvre was large, consisting of novels, collections of poems, short stories, and essays. "Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts, The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the Moist march air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he 's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlike rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy." (from Rabbit, Run by John Updike, Alfred A. Knopf, 1960) John Updike was born in Reading in Pennsylvania, but until he was 13
he lived in Shillington, a smaller city near Reading, and then he moved
away to Plowville, PA. Updike's childhood was shadowed by psoriasis and
stammering, but his mother encouraged him to write. In his childhood
Updike lived in an isolated farm. Escaping to the world of mystery
novels, he consumed books by Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Agatha
Christie, and John Dickson Carr, which he borrowed from the public
library. A lot of his early reading was
English; dead foreign authors depressed him. "I read a funny bunch of
not very high-class writers, although they seemed very high class to
me. . . . I was able to get into this artifical English world, maybe
because it was artifical, with great ease and pleasure. . . . I'm
almost an English
novelist manqué," Updike recalled. ('John Updike Still Finds Things to Say about Life, Sex, and Religion' by Katherine Stephen, in Conversations with John Updike, edited by James Plath, 1994, p. 189) From the middle of his teens, Updike submitted drawings, poems, and stories to The New Yorker; all were rejected. After high school in Shillington, where his father worked as a science teacher, Updike attended Harvard – Updike chose the university because it was the location of the world's oldest humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon. "My inability to read bravely as a boy had this advantage: when I went to college, I was a true tabula rasa, and received gratefully the imprint of my instructors' opinion, and got good marks." (New York Times, July 4, 1965) Updike majored in English in 1954, and contributed to and later edited the Harvard Lampoon. He started as a cartoonist, but then shifted to poetry and prose. With his wife Mary Pennington, the daughter of a minister of the First Unitarian Church, Updike spent the academic year 1954-1955 at Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford, England: ". . . soggy little island huffing and puffing to keep up with Western Europe". (Picked Up Pieces by John Updike, 1975, p. 57) In 1955 he joined The New Yorker staff, writing editorials, poetry, stories, and criticism. After the author's first marriage was dissolved, he married in 1977 Martha Bernhard. From the age of 23, Updike supported himself by writing. He moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he lived for seventeen years. The small town became the model for Tarbox in his novel Couples (1968), behind which hide Choderlos de Laclos's 18th-century novel Dangerous Liaisons. The portrait of sexual passion in darkest New England amongst a group of young suburban married couples was criticized as merely an "uptown Peyton Place". Another fictional town is Eastwick, the scene of the bestseller The Witches of Eastwick (1984) and its sequel, The Widows of Eastwick (2008). In 1958 Updike made his debut as a poet with the volume The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures. Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), was inspired by Henry Green's Concluding and told about the residents of an old people's home. Basically Updike was trying to write a novel, as he explained, "which would serve, in its breadth, as a base for further novels". ('Introduction,' in Conversations with John Updike, edited by James Plath, 1994, p. xiv) Updike wrote every weekday morning. He did little revisions, "Kerouac was right in emphasizing a certain flow, a cdertain ease." (Picked Up Pieces by John Updike, 1975, p. 495) The Centaur (1963) used a mythological framework to explore
the relationship of a frustrated teacher of science and his son, who
becomes an artist. The prototype of the father is the ancient centaur,
Chiron, who was mocked and wounded by his pupils. The Coup
(1979) was an exotic first-person narration by an ex-dictator of a
fictitious African state. David Foster Wallace's review of the novel Toward the End of Time (1997) in the New York Observer
was very negative, if not outright offensive. His remark, that Updike
was "just a thesaurus with a penis," was widely circulated. (Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max, 2013, p. 243) In Updike's prequel to Hamlet
(2000) the moody prince is not the central character but the story
focuses on his mother Queen Gertrude, her husband, and Claudius, her
husband's younger brother. Terrorist,
Updike's 22nd novel, was
about an 18-year-old Islamic extremist, who is deadly serious in his
critique of American
culture. "Present teen attitudes are in a way part of what the book is
about, isn't it?" Updike said in an interview. "These things are
possible not just because of suicide bombers in Iraq but because of
high school students in Colorado or New Jersey or anywhere else who are
actually planning massacres followed by their own deaths. This is so
beyond what was present in my high school, I think." ('Old Master in a Brave New World' by Lev Grossman, TIME, 28.5.2006) Humaira Riaz argued in Unfolding Islamophobic Racism in American Fiction (2022) that Updike's novel Terrorists
portraits Muslin characters in negative light; it "sets a fine example
to accentuate American writers' assumptions of Islam as a monolithic
and dreaful religion." (Ibid., p. 45) The first book about Updike's famous hero, Harry Angstrom, the
natural athlete, a sexually magnetic, blue-eyed Swede, ended with the
verb "Runs." Updike wrote the book in the present tense, giving it a
sort of cinematic quality. At the suggestion of the publisher, Alfred
A. Knopf, some sexually explicit passages were removed, but the text
was restored with some corrections and improvements in the Modern
Library edition and in the Knopf reissue. In Rabbit, Redux – Redux is Latin for brought back – Harry is a middle-aged bourgeois, who finds his life shattered by the infidelity of his wife. Updike leaves the reader with a question -- O.K.? The last word in Rabbit Is Rich was "His." Rabbit at Rest, set in the late 1980s, paralleled the decay of society, AIDS-plagued America, and Rabbit's swollen body, his chest pains, and his feeling that there is "nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold . . ." (Rabbit at Rest, Random House Trade Paperbacs 1996, p. 9) After leaving Rabbit in 1990, Updike published a 182-page novella called 'Rabbit Remembered' in Licks of Love (2000), a collection of short stories. 'Rabbit Remembered' ends with the word "Gladly." Updike lived in New England, where most of his fiction is set, and
in Massachusetts, about twenty miles from Boston. As an essayist Updike
was a gentle satirist, poking fun at American life and customs, without
any mean-spirited nihilism. He observed the ordinary life he saw around
him, and frequently asked the reader to recognize and reconsider
preconceptions. In 'The Bankrupt Man' (1983) Updike looked at failure as a great success:
"The bankrupt man buys himself a motorcycle. He is going to hotdig it
all the way to Santa Barbara and back. He has a bankrupt sister in
Santa Barbara. Also, there are business details to be cleared up along
the way, in Pittsburgh, South Bend, Dodge City, Santa Fe, and Palm
Springs. Being bankrupt is an expansionist process; it generates even
new horizons." ('The Bankrupt Man', in Hugging The Shore: Essays and Criticism, 1983, p. 22) The majority of Updike's non-fiction were occasional, and he
considered the opportunity to produce reviews educational for himself,
"for writing educates the writer as it goes along." Or: "My purpose in
reading has ever secretly been not to come and judge but to come and
steal." (Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism, 1991, p. xxiv) Updike measured writing with traditional maxims: felicity in
style, accuracy in presenting one's subject, precision in describing
the external and inner world, and humanistic values. The writers whose
works he reviewed included such names as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Kurt
Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, Iris Murdoch, Michael Tournier, Raymond
Queneau, Umberto Eco, Milan Kundera, Evgenii Evtushenko, Gabriel García
Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Isabel Allende. From 1979 to 2008, Updike was active as an art critic, writing both on European and American art and museum shows. He contibuted to the American edition of the French art magazine Réalités, Art & Antiques, Travel + Leisure, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, and from 1990 to The New York Review of Books, in which he was made a regular art critic. Updike's essays have been collected in Just Looking (1989), which was praised as "original and perspective," and Still Looking (2005). Many of his reviews on European art appeared in Higher Gossip (2011). Professional art critics questioned Updike critical judgements on nonrepresentational art; in general, he was more effective when writing on representational art. In his autobiographical piece, 'The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood', Updike called sex, art, and religion "the three great secret things" in human experience. James Yerkes defined in his introduction to John Updike and Religion (2002), a collection of essays dealing with the religious vision of the author, "the religious consciousness in Updike may best be characterized as our sense of an unavoidable, unbearable, and unbelievable Sacred Presence." (Ibid., p. 10) Existential questions were in the center of Updike's work from the beginning of his career. He also read theologians for guidance and regularly attended church for worship. Updike received several awards, including Guggenheim Fellow (1959), Rosenthal Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters (1959), National Book Award in Fiction (1964), O. Henry Prize (1967-68), American Book Award (1982), National Book Critics Circle Award, for fiction (1982, 1990), Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award (1982), National Arts Club Medal of Honor (1984); National Medal of the Arts (1989). Updike became in 1976 a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in November 2003 he received the National Medal for Humanites at the White House, joining a very small group of notables who have been honored with both the National Medal of Art and the National Medal for the Humanites. His novels Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest won Pulitzer Prizes. John Updike died of lung cancer on January 27, 2009. The poems, which he wrote in the last years of his life, were collected in the posthumously published Endpoint (2009).
Selected works:
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