John updike most famous works

John updike wikipedia

Self-Consciousness: Memoirs , published in , paints the landscape of his boyhood in Shillington, on the outskirts of Reading, southwest of the formerly solid mill town and extending into Pennsylvania Dutch farm country. Much later, at the Harvard Lampoon , of which he was president in his senior year, he was still at it. At Harvard he took art classes with Hyman Bloom, a painter who was associated with a style known as Boston Expressionism.

One of his later novels, Seek My Face , , follows the lines of the life of an aging painter who often lived in the shadows of her more famous husband, also a painter. Witches takes place in a post-Pop art time, so in a sense dust has gathered on the movement, which was fairly short-lived. He is known to many first as an author of short stories, with dozens having graced the pages of the New Yorker before being published in collections.

Many other readers know his shorter fiction either through the O. Updike is, of course, also an accomplished literary critic, whose reviews and essays are as much distinguished by their breadth of understanding as by their charitable disposition. He has also applied his habile wit to poetry, composing early on a collection called The Carpentered Hen in Three more tomes of verse followed.

After having met Katharine White, fiction editor at the New Yorker during his year of study at the Ruskin School, he began submitting stories regularly to the magazine and then settled in an apartment in Manhattan for his two-year stint there. Migrating from Gotham to Ipswich, he thrived amid salubrious sea breezes and continued to publish at the rate he set for himself early in his career, about a book a year.

Albright College in Reading the fictional Brewer readers first encountered in Rabbit Run bestowed upon him an honorary Litt. Along with his finely tuned regard for painting, which has often provided the visual element for his fiction, there has been a deep and abiding appreciation of the reading life in general and a love of the book in particular.

He has alluded to an imagined reader of his, ideal or otherwise, as being a teenage boy who happens upon one of his books on the dusty shelves of some library one afternoon looking for literary adventure. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity.