American writer, a prolific novelist and a perfectionist. His books include “Couples,” 1968, “Run Rabbit, Run,” 1962 and “Centaur,” 1963, a story of Chiron. A dedicated craftsman, he has been awarded the National Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize on 4/12/1982.
Updike was born in a small town in Pennsylvania, which he later used as a model for the fictional towns in his books. He suffered from psoriasis and stammered as a child, so his parents, Wesley Russell and Linda Grace, encouraged him to write. His maternal grandparents lived with the family, and in 1945, they all moved to the farmhouse where his mother had been born. It was an isolated place, and he dreamed of escaping while immersing himself in books. He read nothing by “dead” authors, however, saying they depressed him. After graduating from high school as class president and co-valedictorian, he entered Harvard University on a scholarship. He chose the school primarily because it had the “Harvard Lampoon,” and he began drawing and writing for the magazine. He graduated summa cum laude in 1954, and soon thereafter, sold his first short story, “Friends from Philadelphia,” to “The New Yorker.” That summer, he traveled to England on a Knox Fellowship and enrolled in the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford where he spent 1954-55.
On his return to the United States in 1955, he joined the staff of “The New Yorker” where for the next two years he wrote editorials, stories, poetry and criticism. In 1957, he became a full-time writer and moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts where he stayed for 17 years. His first book of poetry, “The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures,” was published in 1958, and his first novel, “The Poorhouse Fair,” was released in 1959. His “Rabbit” series was one of his most popular, and in 2000, he included a novella called “Rabbit Remembered” as part of “Licks of Love,” a collection of short stories.
On 6/26/1953, Updike married Mary E. Pennington, a fine arts major at Radcliffe. They had four children, Elizabeth (4/01/1955), David (1/19/1957), Michael (5/14/1959) and Miranda (12/15/1960). In 1976, the relationship ended in divorce. A year later on 9/30/1977, he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, who already had three sons.
He died of lung cancer on January 27, 2009, age 76. At the time of his death he was in a hospice facility near his home in Beverly Farms, MA.
Link to Wikipedia biography