“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”
I once told my brother that there were three great American novelists still living today, authors that stand far beyond the rest of the pack. Authors from a different era, authors that transcend brilliance, authors that consistently push the boundaries with each release and raise the bar for every other author out there. We know the greats from the past – Hemingway, Faulker, Fitzgerald, Twain, Steinbeck – and these are authors that fifty years from now would be studied in universities right alongside them. These authors, I told my brother, were Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and John Updike.
Well, we’ve lost one of these greats today.
John Updike has succumbed to lung cancer at the age of 76.
Updike was probably best known for his masterful series of four novels and one novella that spanned the life of the struggling Rabbit Angstrom, one of my favorite characters in all of literature. Two of these novels were awarded the Pulitzer Prize (Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest). He’s published over two dozen other novels, (among them, The Witches of Eastwick, The Centaur, S., and Couples) and hundreds of short stories, poems, and essays over his long and prosperous career. He will be missed greatly, but he left plenty to be read, and even just released The Widows of Eastwick this past year and he has a new collection of short stories still on the way.
If there is ever a time to pick up some Updike, it’d be now. Why not start off with one of his short stories, just for a taste?
“When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher’s shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don’t feel that now. I don’t feel that we have the merger of serious and pop— it’s gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they’re less comfortable with the written word.”
-John Updike, 2000 Interview
Just a few months ago:
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