Tributes to Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike, who died Tuesday after losing the battle with lung cancer at the age of 76, started pouring in from Authors Ian McEwan and Martin Amis.

“Atonement” and “On Chesil Beach” author, Ian McEwan described Updike in an interview with the Guardian as “the greatest novelist writing in English at the time of his death.”

Using the finest words, McEwan called Updike “a modern master, a colossal figure in American letters, the finest writer working in English,” who dazzled his readers with his interests and intellectual curiosity. 

“Religion, sex, science, urban decay, small-town life, the life of the heart, the betrayals – who can follow him? Updike gave the impression he had a lot more writing to do. We are all the poorer now,” McEwan added.

A New Yorker staff writer and celebrated fiction author, Updike is well known for a myriad of works, including essays, novels, reviews, short stories and poetry, but his most famous works include the well known, “Rabbit” series, two of which won Pulitzer Prizes, as well as the fun and memorable “The Witches of Eastwick,” which was made into a movie starring  Jack Nicholson, Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon.

Writing in The Guardian, Amis, author of “London Fields” and “Time’s Arrow,” said Updike was “one of the great American novelists of the 20th century” and his death represented “a very cold day for literature.”

Another Pulitzer Prize-winning US novelist, Philip Roth, said Updike was “our time's greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer.”

“He is, and always will be, no less a national treasure than his 19th century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. His death constitutes a loss to our literature that is immeasurable,” he added.

Born March 18, 1932, John Hoyer Updike, grew up in Pennsylvania where he showed special talent for writing from an early age. By the age of 23, the writer had already earned a full scholarship to Harvard, a fellowship to Oxford University in England and was offered a highly sought after position at The New Yorker, where he birthed a legendary literary career during which he published 61 books of poetry, short stories, novels, essays and criticism. His works often focused on undercurrents of tension masked by the mundane surface of suburban America, which boomed in 1960s and 1970s as his career was taking off. Ripples of sexual tension were frequent.

Remembering Updike, author Richard Ford said Updike was who a writer was supposed to be, a person who dedicated his life to writing, who wasn't a teacher and, most importantly, wrote very serious books that a lot of people read.

“He's certainly been on the screen of my life since I was a teenager,” 64-year-old Ford said after learning of Updike’s passing. “But for all of his brilliance, his immense curiosity and great ‘width’ as a writer who virtually thought straight on to the page at an extremely high level, in America we seemed almost to take him for granted.”