"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or
better."
John Hoyer Updike was born in Reading, 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 supported himself by writing. He lived in New England, where most of his fiction is set, and in Massachusetts. He had four children and authored
more than 50 books including novels, collections of short stories, poems and criticism. He 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 on January 27, 2009 aged 76.
Partial Bibliography
This quote & biography originally ran in an issue of BookBrowse's membership magazine. Full Membership Features & Benefits.
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