John Updike, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction whose novels and short stories exposed an undercurrent of ambivalence and disappointment in small-town, middle-class America, died Tuesday. He was 76.
Updike’s death from lung cancer was announced by Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher. Updike was a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., but the announcement did not indicate where he died.
Updike published more than 50 books, more than 20 of them novels, and countless short stories, as well as collections of poetry. In recent years, he was best known for his art criticism and essays. His last published piece was a review of Toni Morrison’s novel “A Mercy” in the Nov. 3 issue of The New Yorker.
“He had a remarkably wide range of literary interests that was never in my view superficial or casual,” Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, said Tuesday. The New York Review of Books published many of Updike’s reviews.
Updike’s literary criticism, Silvers noted, covered nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some 19th-century authors.
Two of Updike’s most memorable fictional characters, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom and Henry Bech, became emblems of the displaced American male that fascinated him as a writer. Angstrom, a man he often referred to as his alter-ego, is the disenchanted middle-class drifter in Updike’s four-book “Rabbit” series. Bech is the Jewish-American novelist, breaking away from his cultural roots and immigrant heritage to become a fully assimilated American. Each in his own way reflects Updike’s major themes.
Early in his career, Updike said he wrote most often about the world he came from, “the American Protestant small-town middle class,” as he described it in a 1966 interview with Life magazine. “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”
Updike was still in his 20s when his second novel, “Rabbit Run,” brought him national attention in 1960. Three more novels about Angstrom followed: “Rabbit Re- dux” in 1971, “Rabbit Is Rich” in 1981 and “Rabbit at Rest” in 1990. The last two in the series each won a Pulitzer, and “Rabbit Is Rich” won the American Book Award and National Book Award.
Most of Updike’s short stories appeared first in The New Yorker, where he was briefly a writer and, for decades, a regular contributor.
His first novel, “The Poorhouse Fair” (1959), published when he was 27, is about senior citizens in a retirement home, cut off from the world except during their annual fair. Updike referred to the book as an example of his “shadowy vision” of adult life.
Several of Updike’s novels were made into movies. “The Witches of Eastwick,” where realism spins off into fantasy, shows what happens when bored suburban women capable of witchery meet one devilish man.
His last book, “Widows of Eastwick,” published last year, was a sequel to “Witches.”
In 2004, he said he was ready to slow his pace. He would reduce “product,” as he referred to his fiction, but not stop. “Writing makes you more human,” he said.
