John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and died
in January 2009. He attended Shillington High School, Harvard
College and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford,
where he spent a year on a Knox Fellowship. From 1955 to 1957 he
was a member of the staff of the New Yorker, to which he has
contributed numerous poems, short stories, essays and book reviews.
Since 1957 he has lived in Massachusetts as a freelance writer.
John Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published in
1959. It was followed by Rabbit, Run, the first volume of what have
become known as the Rabbit books, which John Banville described as
'one of the finest literary achievements to have come out of the US
since the war'. Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990)
were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Other novels by John Updike include Marry Me; The Witches of
Eastwick, which was made into a major feature film; Memories of the
Ford Administration; Brazil; In the Beauty of the Lilies; Toward
the End of Time; Terrorist; Villages; and The Widows of Eastwick, a
sequel to The Witches of Eastwick. He wrote a number of volumes of
short stories, and a selection entitled Forty Stories - which
includes stories taken from The Same Door; Pigeon Feathers; The
Music School; and Museums and Women - is published in Penguin, as
is the highly acclaimed The Afterlife and Other Stories. His
criticism and his essays, which first appeared in magazines such as
The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, have been
collected in five volumes. Golf Dreams, a collection of his
writings on golf, has also been published. His Collected Poems
1953-1993 brings together almost all of the poems from five
previous volumes, including 'Hoping for a Hoopoe', 'Telephone
Poles' and 'Tossing and Turning', as well as seventy poems
previously unpublished in book form. John Updike's last books were
Endpoint, a final collection of poems, and My Father's Tears and
Other Stories, a collection of short stories. Both were published
by Penguin in 2009.
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