Updike, John Hoyer 1932-
US novelist, poet and critic

Born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, he studied at Harvard and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England (1954-55). He then worked for the New Yorker (1955-57), the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship with the magazine to which he has contributed short stories, poems and book reviews. His status as one of the world's major writers is due largely to his fiction. Sophisticated, linguistically supple, fluent and inventive, his beat is middle-class USA, his concerns those that have dominated the 20th century: sex, marriage, adultery, divorce, religion, materialism. Among his best-known books are The Centaur (1963), the Rabbit series - Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990, Pulitzer Prize) - chronicling the life of a car salesman, Couples (1968), The Coup (1978) and The Witches of Eastwick (1984). More recent works include Roger's Version (1986) and In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996). Self-Consciousness, a memoir, was published in 1989 and his Collected Poems 1953-1993 were published in 1993.

Bibliography: R Detweiler, John Updike (1972, rev edn 1984)