John Updike

A case of measles in kindergarten left Updike with psoriasis that never fully went away, scaling patches of skin he spent decades treating with sunlamps on the side porch of his Shillington, Pennsylvania house. He never learned to swim because of how he looked in a bathing suit, and by his own account the skin decided his career: "Because of my skin, I counted myself out of any of those jobs — like waiting on tables, selling shoes — that demand being presentable," leaving what he called a closeted trade like cartooning or writing. His mother had literary ambitions of her own, and he watched her write before he sat down at his own desk. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954.

Updike joined The New Yorker's staff around 1955 and published a book most years for the rest of his life, more than twenty novels and a dozen story collections alongside poetry and criticism. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the failed high-school athlete he followed across four novels from 1960 to 1990, became the project readers measured him by, and the third and fourth installments each won a Pulitzer, making him one of only four writers to win the fiction prize twice. "Couples," "The Centaur" and "The Witches of Eastwick" filled out a body of work built almost entirely around suburban Protestant marriages, the sex inside them and the faith around them.

He left his first wife, Mary Pennington, and their four children in 1974 for Martha Bernhard, whom he married in 1977, after two decades of what his fiction had already been describing under other names. Critics who admired the sentences increasingly split on what the sentences were doing: James Wood called the worldview beneath them "hard, coarse, primitive, misogynistic," pointing to a pattern of writing women's bodies in close anatomical detail while leaving their inner lives thin. Updike, who had read Karl Barth's theology closely enough that it shaped his fiction, spent a career being told by some readers he wasn't Christian enough and by others that he was too Christian to be taken seriously — a contradiction he never fully resolved either way.

He died of lung cancer in January 2009, at 76, still working; a novel about the apostle Paul was left unfinished on his desk. Two National Book Awards and three National Book Critics Circle Awards had already piled up alongside the Pulitzers by then, along with the National Medal of Arts in 1989 and the Jefferson Lecture in 2008. The reputation since has bent the way James Wood's critique predicted: reissues and retrospectives treat the prose as settled and the sexual politics as the live argument, with one generation of novelists citing him as a stylistic model and another citing Rabbit Angstrom as exactly the kind of interior American fiction no longer wants to center.

John Updike's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Rabbit, Run book
  First of the four Rabbit Angstrom novels 1960
• Couples book 1968
• Rabbit Is Rich book
  Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1981
• The Witches of Eastwick book 1984
• Rabbit at Rest book
  Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1990
• Self-Consciousness book
  Memoir, including the essay "At War with My Skin" 1989

• February 1938 aged 5 A case of measles triggers the psoriasis that shapes his self-image
• 1954 aged ~22 Graduates summa cum laude from Harvard
• 1955 aged ~23 Joins the staff of The New Yorker
• 1960 aged ~28 Publishes Rabbit, Run, introducing Harry Angstrom
• 1974 aged ~42 Leaves his first marriage for Martha Bernhard
• 1982 aged ~50 Wins his first Pulitzer Prize, for Rabbit Is Rich
• 1991 aged ~59 Wins a second Pulitzer, for Rabbit at Rest
• January 27, 2009 aged 76 Dies of lung cancer in Danvers, Massachusetts

• J. D. Salinger 1919–2010
  Author whose fiction, especially The Catcher in the Rye, became a lasting touchstone of adolescent alienation. contemporary in postwar fiction
• Philip Roth 1933–2018
  Novelist whose explorations of Jewish American identity and sexuality earned him a Pulitzer Prize. friendly rival
• Tom Wolfe 1930–2018
  New Journalism pioneer whose The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities chronicled American culture. called one of his three stooges
• Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804–1864
  Novelist whose The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables explored Puritan guilt and sin. literary heir of