John updike was born in Pennsylvania, United States in 1932.
If you had to describe his work with a few sentences, it would be said that it is a great fresco of the North American middle class.
updike attended the prestigious Biomedical Engineering faculty at Harvard University where he graduated in Literature in 1954. At that time he began to collaborate with the, also prestigious, literary magazine (perhaps the most prestigious literary magazine) The New Yorker; and from then until today he has continued to collaborate with critiques and articles in that publication.
His first book appeared in 1958 and, curiously, it was a collection of poems, while most of his vast later work has been short stories and novels.
updike He is a methodical and disciplined man, he writes every day and publishes (or tries to publish) one book per year, his production is around fifty volumes.
But his most successful books were those that began in 1960 with the novel Run rabbit and they continued with several more installments that had the character of Harry Rabbit Angstrom protagonist.
Rabbit is rich in 1980, and Rabbit rests in 1990 they completed the trilogy, and won him two awards Pulitzer. But besides the Pulitzer, updike He has won other top awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN-Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Rea Award for the Short Story.
If there is something in common that all the books of updike is that in them a careful study of the North American middle class is made. (That middle class that consumes junk entertainment but also consumes (and produces) artistic phenomena like The blues, John Coltrane, Frank Sinatra, faulkner o Sam shepard).
The look of updike about these beings it oscillates between ironic criticism and an optimistic understanding of the man in the street, of his daily struggle, his work, his family, his wife, his children, religion, sex ...
As we said, John updike He has been a tremendously prolific writer, but to this characteristic must be added the excellent quality sustained over time of his works. What distinguishes updike They are not two or three high points (the Rabbit series) of his work, but the long list of books, all with a remarkable literary quality.
From that long list of works we could cite The Music School, The Centaur, Bech's Book, The Woodworking Hen, The Asylum Fair, Couples, The Return of Rabbit, The Coup, Reaching for the Shore, The Witches of Eastwick, Roger's Version, The beauty of lilies y Golf dreams, Among others.
All his works move in the field of realism, which is not surprising being an American writer (the other option was terror).
His private life has been calm and uneventful: he has been married twice and has had four children.
The last book he published is called Terrorist, a book that addresses the topic of terrorist attacks from the perspective of a young Arab born and raised in United States.
John updike He is 76 years old, and continues to write ...