Popular quotes: The meaning an history behind "Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better."
"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or
better."
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.
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.
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