John Updike, chronicler of America, dies at 76

Published on Tuesday 27 January 2009 20:59

JOHN Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, died yesterday at the age of 76.

Considered to be one of the giants of 20th-century literature, Updike was a prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of post-war American life, once describing his main literary muse as "the American small town, Protestant middle-class".

His death was announced in a statement by his publisher, Alfred A Knopf, last night.

"It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning at the age of 76, after a battle with lung cancer.

"He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed," said Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A Knopf.

Updike was best-known internationally for his series of four novels and a novella chronicling the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom through the final decades of the 20th century, and for the novel The Witches of Eastwick.

The latter was made into a hit Hollywood film in 1987 starring Jack Nicholson, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer, and adapted as a stage musical.

Other notable books included Couples, a sexually explicit tale of suburban sex that sold millions of copies; In the Beauty of the Lilies, an epic of American faith and fantasy; and Too Far to Go, which followed the courtship, marriage and divorce of the Maples, a suburban couple with parallels to Updike's own first marriage.

Updike worked in almost every literary form, publishing novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir Self-Consciousness and even a famous essay about the baseball great Ted Williams.

Last night, author Joyce Carol Oates, a friend of Updike, said there was a "lumonisity in his style that was extraordinary. He also had a wonderful, warm, sympathetic sense of humour people didn't always notice".

His books recorded the extremes of earthly desire and spiritual zealotry – whether the comic philandering of the preacher in A Month of Sundays or the steady rage of the young Muslim in Terrorist.

A believer in hard work, he published more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1932, Updike's work, he said, spoke for millions of Depression-era readers raised by "penny-pinching parents", united by "the patriotic cohesion of the Second World War" and blessed by a "disproportionate share of the world's resources". His work dealt with America's post-war, suburban boom of "idealistic careers and early marriages".

Plagued from an early age by asthma, psoriasis and a stammer, he found creative outlets in drawing and writing.

A lifelong churchgoer, he was influenced by his faith, but not immune to doubts.

"I remember the times when I was wrestling with these issues, that I would feel crushed. I was crushed by the purely materialistic, atheistic account of the universe," he said in an interview in 2006.

"I am very prone to accept all that the scientists tell us, the truth of it, the authority of the efforts of all the men and women spent trying to understand more about atoms and molecules. But I can't quite make the leap of unfaith, as it were, and say, 'This is it. Carpe diem (seize the day), and tough luck'."

He studied English at Harvard University, where he contributed to, and subsequently edited, the satirical Harvard Lampoon magazine, and spent a year as an art student at Oxford University. Updike later joined the writing staff of the New Yorker magazine. He is said to have captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation's confusion over the civil rights and women's movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War.

As a result, critics of his work lambasted Updike as a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment. On purely literary grounds, he was attacked by Norman Mailer as the kind of writer appreciated by readers whom he said knew nothing of writing. But more often, Updike was praised for his poetic style.

He won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and two National Book Awards, but failed to achieve a Nobel Prize.

His wit and wisdom on…

FAME

"As soon as one is aware of being 'somebody', to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf. One can either see or be seen."

WRITING

"Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf – on the edge of normality."

FANTASY

"Dreams come true; without that, nature would not incite us to have them."

GOLF

"Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golfers become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five."

AMERICA

"Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them."

SEX

"Sex is like money; only too much is enough."

EXISTENCE

"Most of American life consists of driving somewhere then returning home, wondering why the hell you went."

GOD

"Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life."

CRITICS

"Criticism is to fiction as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."

LOVE

"We are most alive when we're in love."

DEATH

"We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one."