John Updike’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, announced that Updike, who lived in Beverly Farms, Mass., died on Tuesday of lung cancer. He was 76 and died in a hospice in Massachusetts, the state where he lived for many years.
"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’s best-selling novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom are often considered the quintessential portrait of the American male in the late 20th century. "Rabbit is Rich," published in 1981, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. A decade later, "Rabbit at Rest" won a second Pulitzer.
Rabbit allowed Updike to explore the life and eventual death of a middle-class, suburban male in America. Harry Angstrom was often unlikable and selfish, but millions of readers found him to be an extraordinarily accurate mirror, reflecting our times and our obsession with sports.
An author whose work was rich in poetry and detail, Updike was a lifelong churchgoer originally raised in the Protestant community of Shillington, Pa. He became most famous as a "chronicler of suburban adultery." He once wrote of it, "... a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me." Yet, on many occasions, Updike slipped away from familiar territory: “The Witches of Eastwick,” 1984, a novel that dealt with three women who turn to devil worship after their marriages break down. The 1987 film adaptation starred Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Cher and Susan Sarandon. Updike published a sequel, “The Widows of Eastwick,” last October. In the sequel, the widows lament old age and catalog bodily complaints. One fears “the cells of my body are getting impatient with me. They’re bored with housing my spirit.” Another says, “We’re ancient.”
Moreover: “The Coup (novel),” 1978, about a fictional Cold War-era African dictatorship, was similarly a bestseller, and reflects the author writing at his most Nabokovian; his 2000 postmodern effort “Gertrude and Claudius” is a carefully researched overture to the story of Hamlet. Other important novels include “The Centaur” (National Book Award, 1963), “Couples“(1968) and “Roger's Version” (1986). Martin Amis called “Roger's Version” a "near-masterpiece"; Couples both landed the author on the cover of TIME magazine and made his fortune.
While studying on full scholarship at Harvard, he headed the staff of the Harvard Lampoon and met the woman who became his first wife, Mary Entwistle Pennington, whom he married in June 1953, a year before he earned his A.B. degree summa cum laude. Updike divorced Pennington in 1975 and was remarried two years later, to Martha Bernhard.
For Updike, the high life meant books, such as the volumes of P.G. Wodehouse and Robert Benchley he borrowed from the library as a child, or, as he later recalled, the "chastely severe, time-honored classics" he read in his dorm room at Harvard University, leaning back in his "wooden Harvard chair," cigarette in hand.
