John Updike,

In canonical works, including the four Rabbit Angstrom novels, the Henry Bech stories, “ Couples ,” and “ The Centaur, ” John Updike documented what he called “the American Protestant small-town middle class.” Born in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 1932, he studied to be a cartoonist before beginning his long association with The New Yorker , in 1954, as a contributor of Talk of the Town pieces, fiction, and poetry. Updike, whom George Saunders called “a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky,” published more than a hundred and forty stories in the magazine, exploring family, marriage, infidelity, mortality, and faith, and won both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Award twice, in addition to the National Medal of Arts, in 1989, and the National Humanities Medal, in 2003. His career at The New Yorker began with a poem , published in 1954, and ended with a poem , published in 2009, a few weeks after his death.

1 picks · 2001