John Updike

John Updike was raised by working-class parents in Berks County, Pennsylvania. He attended Harvard College, where he won the Scholastic Art and Writing award and was a frequent contributor to the Harvard Lampoon literary review. There he met and married his first wife, Mary Pennington, with whom he had four children. After graduating Suma Cum Laude, he attended the Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University with ambitions to become a cartoonist, but he ultimately moved back to the United States and began a career at The New Yorker, during which time he published hundreds of his own short stories and poems in the magazine before becoming an independent novelist. Drawing on his humble, protestant upbringing, Updike’s body of work concerns “the American small town, Protestant middle class.” He is best known for his “Rabbit” series, which chronicled several decades in the life of an American middle class man (Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom), and for which he won two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction. Updike published more than a twenty novels and numerous short story collections throughout his life. He died from lung cancer in 2009, at the age of seventy-six.