John Updike death

• Author: admin
• Filed under: Uncategorized
• Date: Jan 27,2009

E Online

Prolific, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Updike has died of lung cancer at the age of 76.

According to publisher Alfred A. Knopf Inc., Updike died at a hospice not far from his home in Beverly Farms, Mass.

Several of his works wound up in Hollywood hands, most notably the James Caan-starring adaptation of one his most famous books, Rabbit, Run (which earned him his first Pulitzer), and The Witches of Eastwick, which, thanks to Jack Nicholson, Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon became a star-studded, twice Oscar-nominated affair.

The author even went on to earn the ultimate pop-culture honor—playing himself in an episode of The Simpsons.

Updike’s final work, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, his first collection of new short fiction since 2000, is scheduled for release on June 2.

Christian Science Monitor

After a career that spanned 60-some years and more than 50 books (including novels, short stories, poems, criticism, children’s books, essays, and a memoir) and almost every literary prize (including two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards), John Updike died today at the age of 76.

Born in Reading, Pa., in 1932, Updike was the only child of a mother who dreamed of being a writer and a father who taught high school and struggled with an inferiority complex. He attended Harvard University on a scholarship and briefly worked at The New Yorker before moving to the suburbs north of Boston.

Updike’s best known works were the four “Rabbit” books, which, over a period of 30 years, told the story of the loves and losses of one-time high school basketball star Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.

Washington Post

American author John Updike, a leading writer of his generation who chronicled the emotional drama of American small-town life with searing wit and vivid prose, died on Tuesday of lung cancer. He was 76.

“It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning,” said Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A. Knopf, a unit of Random House. “He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed.”

Updike died in a hospice in Massachusetts, the state where he lived for many years.

Updike was known for mining themes of sexual tension, and spiritual and moral angst in small-town settings — issues he explored through his four novels and a novella about the life of the fictional Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.
“Rabbit is Rich,” published in 1981, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. A decade later, “Rabbit at Rest” won a second Pulitzer.

One of America’s most prolific writers, Updike was acclaimed nearly as much for his short stories, poetry and critical essays as for his novels.

For many readers, he was well known as a seemingly endless source of short stories in The New Yorker magazine.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, he studied English at Harvard University, where he contributed to, and later edited, the satirical Harvard Lampoon magazine. He later joined the writing staff of the New Yorker.

In a Reuters interview in 2005, he said his view of himself as a writer had changed in recent years as he produced an increasing volume of art and literary criticism and struggled with the short-story medium.

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