American · b. 1932
John Updike was one of the most acclaimed and prolific American writers of the twentieth century, a two-time Pulitzer winner best known for the Rabbit tetralogy chronicling middle-class American life.
John Updike was a novelist, short-story writer, poet, and critic of extraordinary productivity and stylistic brilliance, celebrated for chronicling the texture of ordinary American life with luminous prose.
His four “Rabbit” novels, following Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom from the 1950s to the 1990s, won two Pulitzer Prizes and stand as a defining portrait of postwar middle-class America. He also wrote the Bech books, The Witches of Eastwick, and a vast body of acclaimed stories, essays, and criticism, much of it for The New Yorker.
Updike is recognized as a master of American letters, whose dazzling prose elevated the everyday into art.
by John Updike
The fourth and final Rabbit novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In the late 1980s, Harry Angstrom — overweight, ailing, semi-retired in Florida — confronts mortality, a faltering family business, and the long account of a life lived mostly on instinct.
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by John Updike
Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is 46, co-owner of a Toyota dealership, a member of the country club, comfortable and bored in the Pennsylvania suburb he once tried to escape. It is 1979: the gas crisis, Carter's malaise speech, Iran. His son Nelson has come back with a pregnant girlfriend. Updike's Pulitzer Prize winner — middle-class American contentment as its own form of dissatisfaction.
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by John Updike
Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, 26, was a high school basketball star in Mount Judge, Pennsylvania. Now he works demonstrating a kitchen gadget and goes home to a pregnant, alcoholic wife. One spring afternoon he gets in the car and drives south, not quite sure why. Updike's first Rabbit novel and one of the founding documents of postwar American restlessness.
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by John Updike
The second of Updike's Rabbit novels. A decade after Rabbit, Run, Harry Angstrom is a settled, deadened print worker in 1969 — until his wife leaves and his house fills with a runaway teenager and a Black militant, drawing the turmoil of the American 1960s into his living room.
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by John Updike
Three divorced women in a small Rhode Island town have acquired magical powers. When the mysterious Darryl Van Horne arrives, he disrupts their coven. A satirical novel about female power, desire, and the anxieties of the 1960s sexual revolution, told with Updike's characteristic density of observation.
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John Updike's complete bibliography in order — from Rabbit, Run and The Witches of Eastwick to Rabbit Is Rich. Best starting points and Rabbit series reading order.
guide
Where to start with John Updike — whether to begin with Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Is Rich, or The Witches of Eastwick. A complete reading guide.
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