John Updike's Birthday

John Updike was born March 18, 1932. An American novelist and short story author he was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania. Updike's most famous works are his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest, and Rabbit, Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class", Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published about 30 novels and short story collections, as well as some literary criticism. As a child Updike suffered from psoriasis and stammering, and he was encouraged by his mother to write. Updike entered Harvard University on a full scholarship, graduating summa cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English before joining The New Yorker as regular contributor. In 1959 he published a well-regarded collection of short stories, "The Same Door," which included both Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow? and A Trillion Feet Of Gas. He currently lives in Massachusetts. He favors realism naturalism in his writing; for instance the opening of Rabbit, Run, spans several pages describing a pick-up basketball game in intricate detail. Most of his novels follow this style at least loosely, and generally feature everyday people in middle America -- the hero of his writing is typically an everyman one can find on the streets. He on occasion abandons this setting, for instance in The Witches of Eastwick (a novel about witches, later made into a movie of the same name), The Coup (about a fictional Cold War era African dictatorship), and in his 2001 postmodern novel Gertrude and Claudius (a prelude to the story of Hamlet illuminating three versions of the legend including William Shakespeare's). His works often explore sex, death, and their interrelationship. His most recent novel is 2004's Villages; he has also published a large collection of short stories from his formative career, titled The Early Stories 1953-1975. He's a well-known and practicing critic.