John Updike, Novelist
John Updike was born on March 18th, 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania. His family later moved to Massachusetts. Updike attended Harvard University on a full scholarship; graduating magna cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English. While at Harvard, he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. After graduating from Harvard, Updike attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University with dreams of becoming a cartoonist. However, writing seemed to be more attractive to him.
John Updike married Mary E. Pennington in 1953; she was a student at Radcliffe College. Their first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1955. They went on to have one more girl and two sons before divorcing in 1974. In 1977, Updike married Martha Ruggles Bernhard.
In 1954, Updike became writing for the New Yorker magazine. He was responsible for the Talk of the Town column; he also wrote poetry and short stories for the magazine. His first collection of poems (The Carpentered Hen) was published in 1958, followed by The Same Door in 1959. His first novel was Rabbit Run (1960). He went on to write five more Rabbit novels. Rabbit Run was chosen as one of Time Magazine’s All-time 100 greatest novels. The last two novels in the Rabbit series (Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest) won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
John Updike won many awards for his writing including; The National Book Award in 1964 and in 1982, the O Henry Prize in 1966 and 1991, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2004. He is one of the most celebrated American’s authors in history. Updike’s last novel was The Widows of Eastwick in 2008, a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick (1984).
John Updike died on January 27th, 2009 of lung cancer.
