2.
John Updike was born in Shillington, a small town
in Pennsylvania. In his childhood he lived in an
isolated farm, from where he dreamed to escape.
His father was a high school science teacher. An
only child, Updike and his parents shared a
house with his grandparents for much of his
childhood. When he was 13, the family moved to
his mother's birthplace, a stone farmhouse on an
80-acre farm near Plowville, eleven miles from
Shillington, where he continued to attend school.
3.
He graduated from Shillington High School as
co-valedictorian and class president in 1950 and
subsequently attended Harvard after receiving a
full scholarship.
After graduation, he decided to become a graphic
artist and attended The Ruskin School of Drawing
and Fine Art at the University of Oxford. His early
ambition was to be a cartoonist. After returning
to the United States, Updike and his family
moved to New York, where he became a regular
contributor to The New Yorker. This was the
beginning of his writing career.
4.
5.
Updike stayed at The New Yorker as a full staff writer
for only two years, writing "Talk of the Town" columns
and submitting poetry and short stories to the
magazine.
In New York, Updike wrote the poems and stories that
came to fill his early books like The Carpentered Hen
(1958) and The Same Door (1959). These works were
influenced by Updike's early engagement with The New
Yorker.
During this time, Updike also underwent a profound
spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss of religious faith,
he began reading Søren Kierkegaard and the
theologian Karl Barth. Both deeply influenced his own
religious beliefs, which in turn figured prominently in
his fiction. Updike remained a believing Christian for
the rest of his life.
6.
Later, Updike and his family relocated to Ipswich,
Massachusetts.
Ipswich, Updike wrote Rabbit, Run (1960), on a
Guggenheim Fellowship, and The Centaur (1963),
two of his most acclaimed and famous works; the
latter won the National Book Award.
Updike wrote three additional novels about him.
Rabbit, Run was featured in Time's All-TIME 100
Greatest Novels.
Updike's career and reputation were nurtured and
expanded by his long association with The New
Yorker, which published him frequently throughout
his lifetime of writing, despite the fact that he had
departed the magazine's employment after only
two years.
7.
Updike married Mary E. Pennington, an art student
at Radcliffe College, in 1953. She accompanied him
to Oxford, England, where he attended art school
and where their first child, Elizabeth, was born in
1955. The couple had three more children
together: writer David (born 1957), Michael (born
1959) and Miranda (born 1960); Updike and
Pennington divorced in 1974. Updike had seven
grandchildren: Trevor Leonard Updike and Sawyer
Michael Updike, Michael's sons; John Anoff
Cobblah and Michael Kwame Cobblah, Elizabeth's
sons; Kai Daniels Freyleue, Seneca Dunn Freyleue,
and Peter Mickinley Chandler, Miranda's sons; and
Wesley Updike, David's son.
8.
9. In
1977 Updike married Martha
Ruggles Bernhard, with whom he
lived in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts
until his death of lung cancer at a
hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, on
January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.
10. Updike published eight volumes of poetry over his
career, including his first book The Carpentered
Hen (1958), and one of his last, the posthumous
Endpoint (2009). The New Yorker published
excerpts of Endpoint in its March 16, 2009 issue.
Updike's light verse instead as a poetry of
"epigrammatically lucidity His poetry has been
praised for its engagement with "a variety of forms
and topics," its "wit and precision," and for its
depiction of topics familiar to American readers.
11.
British poet Gavin Ewart praised Updike for
the metaphysical quality of his poetry and
for his ability "to make the ordinary seem
strange," and calls Updike one of the few
modern novelists capable of writing good
poetry. Reading Endpoint aloud, the critic
Charles McGrath claimed that he found
"another, deeper music" in Updike's poetry.
12.
Updike was also a
critic of literature and
art, one frequently
cited as one of the
best American critics
of his generation . In
the introduction to
Picked-Up Pieces, his
1975 collection of
prose, he listed his
personal rules for
literary criticism:
13.
1. Try to understand what the author wished to do,
and do not blame him for not achieving what he
did not attempt.
2. Give enough direct quotation — at least one
extended passage — of the book's prose so the
review's reader can form his own impression, can
get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with
quotation from the book, if only phrase-long,
rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away
the ending.
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful
example along the same lines, from the author's œ
uvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure.
Sure it's his and not yours?
14.
Much of Updike's art criticism appeared in The New
York Review of Books, where he often wrote about
American art. His art criticism involved an
aestheticism like that of his literary criticism.
Updike's 2008 Jefferson Lecture, "The Clarity of
Things: What's American About American Art?",
dealt with the uniqueness of American art from the
18th century to the 20th.In the lecture he argued
that American art, until the expressionist
movement of the 20th century in which America
declared its artistic "independence", is
characterized by an insecurity not found in the
artistic tradition of Europe.
16. 1959 Guggenheim Fellow
1959 National Institute of Arts and Letters
Rosenthal Award
1964 National Book Award for Fiction
1965 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger
1966 O. Henry Prize
1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
1982 National Book Award for Fiction
1982 Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award
1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for
Criticism
1984 National Arts Club Medal of Honor
17. 1987
St. Louis Literary Award
1987 Ambassador Book Award
1987 Helmerich Award, the Peggy V. Helmerich
Distinguished Author Award is presented annually
by the Tulsa Library Trust.
1988 PEN/Malamud Award
1989 National Medal of Arts
1990 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
1991 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
1991 O. Henry Prize
1992 Honorary Doctor of Lettersfrom Harvard
University
1995 William Dean Howells Medal of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters
1995 Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des
Lettres
1997 Ambassador Book Award
18. 1995
Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des
Lettres
1997 Ambassador Book Award
1998 National Book Award Medal of
Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
2003 National Humanities Medal
2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
2006 Rea Award for the Short Story
2007 American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold
Medal for Fiction
2008 Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime
Achievement Award
2008 Jefferson Lecture
