Understanding John Updike

A close look at the extraordinary literary achievements of a popular and prolific American author The winner of every major American literary prize, John Updike (19322009) was one of the most popular and prolific novelists of his time and a major cultural figure who traced the high point and fall of midcentury American self-confidence and energy. A superb stylist with sixty books to his credit, he brilliantly rendered the physical surfaces of the nations life even as he revealed the intense longings beneath those surfaces. In Understanding John Updike, Frederic Svoboda elucidates the authors deep insights into the second half of the twentieth century as seen through the lives of ordinary men and women. He offers extended, close readings of Updikes most significant works of fiction, templates through which his entire oeuvre may be understood. A small-town Pennsylvanian whose prodigious talent took him to Harvard, a staff position at the New Yorker, and ultimately a life in suburban Massachusetts, where the pace of his literary output never slowed, Updike was very much in the American cultural tradition. His series of Rabbit Angstrom novels strongly echo Sinclair Lewiss earlier explorations of middle America, while The Witches of Eastwick and related novels are variations on Nathaniel Hawthornes nineteenth-century classic The Scarlet Letter. His number one best seller Couples examines what Time magazine called the adulterous society in the last year of the Kennedy administration, following the nations fall from idealism into self-centeredness. Understanding John Updike will give both new readers and those already familiar with the author a firm grasp of his literary achievement. This outline of Updikes professional career highlights his importance in the life of the nationnot only as a novelist but also as a gifted essayist, reviewer, cultural critic, and poet.