John updike poet biography template

In 2003, Updike (center) received the National Humanities Medal for President George W. Bush and the First Lady, Laura Bush. Wikicommons.

Biography of John Updike

John Updike enjoyed a long and illustrious career, receiving critical acclaim and many awards. Noted for his steady output and distinct writing style, Updike used his work to document life in amerika during the second half of the 20th century.

Early Life and Education

John Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pennsylvania. He grew up in the small town of Shillington, a quiet and comfortable middle-class community. Shillington was the embodiment of the average middle-American town with a population made up of predominantly white, Protestant professional families. This setting would hugely influence Updike's writing, as many of his works would explore the neurosis and hidden vices in the idyllic American suburbs.

From an early age, Updike showed an interest in drawing and painting. Bored by small-town lif

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John Updike

American writer (1932–2009)

John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and Colson Whitehead), Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.

Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His most famous work is his "Rabbit" series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and the novella Rabbit Remembered), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (198

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Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. More books than SparkNotes.

Born on March 18, 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania, John Updike was the only child of a high-school science teacher father and a mother who aspired to be a writer. It was apparently his mother who instilled in young John the passion to write and draw. Updike was a huge fan of humorist books and mysteries throughout his youth and he was prone to consuming them in mass quantities. He aspired to become a cartoonist. He excelled in school, becoming co-valedictorian of Shillington High and receiving a scholarship to attend Harvard. At Harvard, he majored in English and wrote and drew for the Lampoon; his beginnings were thus principally in the mode of humor writing.

Before graduating summa cum laude from Harvard, Updike married Mary A. Pellington, a student at Radcliffe, and in 1954, the year of his commencement, he sold a short story and a poem to The New Yorker. Updike moved with his wife to England to study at