Joyce Carol Oates - New York Times Book Review ( Refers to all four Rabbit Angstrom novels.) The Rabbit novels, for all their grittiness, constitute John Updike's surpassingly eloquent valentine to his country. The being that most illuminates the Rabbit quartet is not finally Harry Angstrom himself but the world through which he moves in his slow downward slide, meticulously recorded by one of the most gifted American realists. The books have also created a Kodachrome-sharp picture of American om the somnolent 50s.into the uncertainties of the 80s. Taken together, this quartet of novels has given readers a wonderfully vivid portrait of one Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom. Henry Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the National Medal of the Arts.
Updike has basically won every major literary prize in America, including the Guggenheim Fellow, the Rosenthal Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the O. He decided to attend Harvard University because he was a big fan of the school's humor magazine, The Harvard Lampoon. Afflicted with psoriasis and a stammer, he escaped from his into mystery novels. Updike first became entranced by reading when he was a young boy growing up on an isolated farm in Pennsylvania. In addition, his criticism and short fiction remain popular staples of distinguished literary publications. In between-indeed, far beyond-his successful series, Updike has gone on to produce an astonishingly diverse string of novels. A concluding novella, "Rabbit Remembered," appears in the 2001 story collection Licks of Love.Īlthough autobiographical elements appear in the "Rabbit" books, Updike's true literary alter ego is not Harry Angstrom but Harry Bech, a famously unproductive Jewish-American writer who stars in his own story cycle. Updike would revisit Angstrom in 1971, 1981, and 1990, chronicling his hapless protagonist's jittery journey into undistinguished middle age in three melancholy bestsellers: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. Former small-town basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom struck a responsive chord with readers and critics alike and catapulted Updike into the literary stratosphere. But it was his second novel, 1960's Rabbit, Run, that forged his reputation and introduced one of the most memorable characters in American fiction. A year later, he made his fiction debut with The Poorhouse Fair. In 1958, Updike's first collection of poetry was published. Since 1957, he has lived in two small towns in Massachusetts that have inspired the settings for several of his stories. Following a year of study in England, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, establishing a relationship with the magazine that continues to this day. With an uncommonly varied oeuvre that includes poetry, criticism, essays, short stories, and novels, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike has helped to change the face of late-20th-century American literature.īorn in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954. 
National Book Award for Rabbit Is Rich, 1982 Pulitzer PrizeĪnd National Book Critics Circle Award for Rabbit at Rest, Pulitzer Prizer, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Awards-National Book Award for The Centaur, 1964.Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England Education-A.B., Harvard University also studied at the.A wealthy white teenager fleeing suburban Connecticut, Jill, enthralls Harry and his son, and the four of them make a scandalous household emblematic of the Summer of Love's most confusing implications. Updike's recurring themes of guilt, sex, and death are joined here by racism, as Harry plays host to an African-American named Skeeter, a cynical, drug-dealing Vietnam vet who engages Harry in debates about the war and race relations. When his wife leaves him for another man, Harry and his twelve-year-old son are at a loss, and the chaotic state of the nation circa 1969 finds its way into Harry's home. This second novel of the Rabbit quartet finds the former high-school basketball star working a dead-end job and approaching middle age in the downtrodden and fictional city of Brewer, Pennsylvania, the city of his birth.
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