Community Chat

[Oznell]

Multiple Pulitzer-winner, brilliant, witty novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, the late John Updike was born on March 18, 1932.  Died of lung cancer at 76 in 2009.

Author of "Rabbit Run", "Rabbit Redux",  "Museums and Women",  "The Centaur",  "Bech, A Book",  and on and on.

His vast, prolific intellect, his never-failing wit, the discretion, yet the disarming honesty of some of his personal revelations, the insistence on 'thinking for himself', and abstaining from the group-think of so many of his academic and literary contemporaries, he just is such a gift to American letters.

[tansy]

I was a fan of his early Rabbit books.

[aroc3435]

@Oznell   Thank you for posting.  I discovered his writing in high school and continued to read all his new works as they came out.

Until his death he became my favorite American living author.  Best known for his Rabbit books, I also loved his poetry.

If you are into essays and literary criticism he wrote some of the best.

aroc3435

[Oznell]

Oh, @aroc3435 ,  very glad you mentioned and like his essays!  As time went on, those were what I came to love best.  His intellect was astounding, nimble, all-encompassing.  He was so clear-eyed, wasn't he, with a devastating kind of honesty, about himself, no less than others. 

[lovesrecess]

Big fan of Updike. He wrote the forward for one of my brother’s books.

[Oznell]

Wow, @lovesrecess ,  your brother must be a very big deal, for Updike to do that.  So cool!

[lovesrecess]

He would kill me if he knew I had mentioned it in a forum like this. It took him almost a year to get Updike to agree to write the forward, but he was thrilled. I think my brother is his #1fan.

[Oznell]

I can well see why he would be.  What an honor.