John Hoyer Updike was born in Reading in Pennsylvania in 1932.
Up until the age of 13
he lived in Shillington, near Reading (where his father was a science
teacher) before moving to Plowville, PA. As a child he suffered
from psoriasis and stammered, but found an outlet in writing, with the
encouragement of his mother, and reading - consuming mysteries by the
likes of Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie and John
Dickson Carr. He attended Harvard where he majored in English
(which he chose because it was the home of the Harvard Lampoon -
which he first contributed to, and later edited). He once
said, "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."
He attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford,
England for a year between 1954-55, and then joined the staff of The
New Yorker writing editorials, poetry, stories and criticism.
Since the age of 23 he has supported himself by writing. He has
lived in New England, where most of his fiction is set, and in
Massachusetts. He is the father of four children and author of
more than 50 books including novels, collections of short stories, poems
and criticism. He has won many awards including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the
National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. He died in January 2009, from lung cancer, at the age of 76.
Partial Bibliography
Harry Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy (Rabbit Run, 1960; Rabbit
Redux, 1971; Rabbit Is Rich, 1981; Rabbit at Rest, 1990).
Henry Bech stories: Bech: A Book, 1970; Bech Is Back,
1982; Bech At Bay, 1998.
The Poorhouse Fair, 1959
The Centaur, 1963
Of the Farm, 1965
Couples, 1968
A Month of Sundays, 1975
Marry Me: A Romance, 1977
The Coup, 1978
Your Lover Just Called, 1980
The Witches of Eastwick, 1984
Roger's Version, 1986
More Stately Mansions, 1987
S, 1988
Memories of the Ford Administration, 1992
Brazil, 1994
In the Beauty of the Lilies, 1996
Toward the End of Time, 1997
Gertrude and Claudius, 2000
Seek My Face, 2002
Villages, 2004
Terrorist, 2006
The Widows of Eastwick, 2008
My Father's Tears, 2009
Endpoint, and Other Poems, 2009
This biography was last updated on 07/05/2009.
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