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John  Updike
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John Updike
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¡@ ¬ù¿«¡E¤Ì´¶¥N§J¥X¥Í©ó¬ü°ê»«¤iªk¥§¨È¦{·ç¤B¥«¡]Reading¡^¡A¤÷¿Ë½Ã´µ²z¡]Wesley R. Updike¡^¦b°ª¤¤¥ô¼Æ¾Ç±Ð®v¡A¥À¿ËµY¹F¡E®æ¹p´µ¡EÀN­C¡]Linda Grace Hoyer¡^¥H§@®a¬°·~¡A¤Ì´¶¥N§J¬O®a¤¤¿W¤l¡C¤@¤E¥|¤­¦~¡A¤Ì´¶¥N§JÁ|®a¾E©¹·ç¤B¥«ªñ­¥ªº®uªL¹y¡]Shillington¡^¡A¤@®a¤T¤f¦b¤j¹A²ø¸Ì¥Í¬¡¡C¤Ì´¶¥N§J¦~¤Ö®É±o¹L¤û¥ÖÅ~¡A¤S¦³¤f¦Y¤ò¯f¡Aµ£¦~¤£§K»X¤W¤@¼h³±¼v¡A¥À¿Ë¹ª§j¥L¼g§@§çµo¤ß±¡¡A¤Ì´¶¥N§J±o¥H°k¹P¶i¤J¯«¯¦ªº¤p»¡¥@¬É¤¤¡A¹¡Äý±À²z¤p»¡®a¤Ìº¸¡E¥v©Z§Q¡E¸ë¼w¯Ç¡]Erle Stanley Gardner¡A1889¡ã1970¦~¡^¡B¦ã°Ç¨½¡D©ø®¦¡]Ellery Queen¡A1905¡ã1982¦~¡^¡Bªü¹Å²ï¡E§J²úµ·¸¦¡]Agatha Christie¡A1890¡ã1976¦~¡^¥H¤Î¬ù¿«¡E¨f§J´Ë¡D¥dº¸¡]John Dickson Carr¡A1906¡ã1977¦~¡^µ¥¤H§@«~¡C

¤Ì´¶¥N§J°ª¤¤²¦·~«áÀò±o¼ú¾Çª÷¡A¤@¤E¤­¡³¦~´NŪ«¢¦ò¤j¾Ç¡]Harvard University¡^­^¤å¨t¡A¥L¦b¬ã¨sÃÀ³N¤§¾l¡AÁÙ½sÄ¡«¢¦ò¤j¾Ç¥Zª«¡m¿Ø¨ë¡n¡]Lampoon¡A¥H³Ð¥Z³Ì¦­ªº«ÕÀqÂø»x»D¦W¡^¡C¤Ì´¶¥N§J¾aµeº©µe°_®a¡A¦Ó«áÂ૬¼g¸Ö©M´²¤å¡A¤@¤E¤­¤T¦~°ù²Ä¤@°ß¤@±Ð·|¡]First Unitarian Church¡^ªª®v¤k¨àº¿ÄR¡E¼ï¹ç¹y¡]Mary Pennington¡^¬°©d¡A²Ý¦~®³¨ì¤å¾Ç¾Ç¦ì¡A¹j¦~Àò±o¿Õ§J´µ¼ú¾Çª÷¡]Knox Fellowship¡^¡A­u­^°ê¤û¬z¤j¾Ç©Ô´µª÷¬ü³N¾Ç®Õ¡]Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art¡^¬ã²ßÃÀ³N¡C

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¡@ ªø½g¤p»¡¡m¥b¤H°¨¡n¡]The Centaur¡A1963¦~¡^±Ä¥Î¯«¸Üªí²{¤âªk¡A±´°Q®Õªø¤÷¿Ë©M¨à¤lªºÃö«Y¡A¤@Á|ºK¤U¬ü°ê°ê®a¹Ï®Ñ¼ú¤p»¡¼ú¡]National Book Award for fiction¡^¡C¡m¥b¤H°¨¡n¤º®e¬O¤¤¦~µe®a¨à¤l¹ï¤÷¿Ëªº¦^¾Ð¡A´|¦X¤F§Æþù°¨¯«¸Ü¤¤¤Ñ¯«©z´µÃd·Rªº¥b¤H°¨»ô­Û¡]Chiron¡^ªº¶Ç»¡¡Aµe®a§â¤÷¿Ë·Q¹³¦¨²{¥N»ô­Û¡A°ª¶Q¦a¬¡¦b§Nºzªº¥@¤W¡AÅ¥±q¦Û¨­©R¹BªºÂ\¥¬¡C¡m¤Ò°ü­Ì¡n¡]Couples¡A1968¦~¡^¬O¤Ì´¶¥N§J³Ì¨üÅwªï¡B¤]¬O³Ì¨ãª§Ä³©Êªº¤p»¡¡AÀ˵ø²{¥N¤H¹L«×»´²vªº©Ê¦æ¬°¡A¡u±¡¼¤¡v³o­Ó¥DÃD¤]´¶¹M¥X²{¦b¤Ì´¶¥N§Jªº§@«~¤¤¡C¡m¶ùµ¹§Ú¡n¡]Marry Me¡A1976¦~¡^±Ô­z³Ç·ç¡]Jerry¡^©M²ï²ú¡]Sally¡^¤Ò©d¤G¤H±B«Ã¤£·ü¡B¥~¹J­I«qªº¬G¨Æ¡A­È±o¤@´£ªº¬O¡A§@ªÌ³z¹L¿ùºî½ÆÂøªº­×Ãã¨t²Î¡A¥]¬AÁô³ë¡B¨å¬G¥H¤Î·N¶Hµ¥¡A§e²{¥D¨¤ºë¯«¤£Ã­©wªºª¬ºA¡C¡m¬FÅÜ¡n¡]The Coup¡A1979¦~¡^±Ä¨ú²Ä¤@¤HºÙÆ[ÂI¡A´y­z¤@­Ó«D¬wµêºc°ê®a«e¿WµôªÌ¥Rº¡²§°ê±¡½Õªº¬G¨Æ¡C

¤@¤E¤C¡³¦~¡A¤Ì´¶¥N§Jªºµu½g¤p»¡¶°¡m¨©§J¡n¡]Bech¡A1970¦~¡^¥X²{¥t¤@¦W­n¨¤¦ë§Q¡E¨©§J¡]Henry Bech¡^¡A¨ä¦b¤å¾Â­«­n©Ê¤£¨È©ó¡u¨ß¤l¡v¡C¨©§J¬OµS¤Ó¸Ç¬üÄy§@®a¡A¦b¸ÞÃÔ¦hÅܪº¾Ç³N°é¤¤¥´ºu¡A¹¡¨ü¤å¾Â²±¦W­t²Ö¡F¡m¨©§JÂk¨Ó¡n¡]Bech is Back¡A1982¦~¡^©M¡m®üÆWªº¨©§J¡n¡]Bech at Bay¡A1998¦~¡^±Ô­z¥D¨¤¦b¿Õ¨©º¸¹{¼ú¨å§¤W¡u¤Ï°ª¼é¡v¡]anti-climactic¡^ªº¦æ®|¡C¥t¤@¥»µu½g¤p»¡¶°¡m»»¤£¥i¤Î¡n¡]Too Far to Go¡A1979¦~¡^¤¤¡A²z¹î¡]Richard¡^©Mã¦w¡]Joan¡^¤Ò°ü­Ç¬J³¤°s¤S±B«Ã¥X­y¡A¤G¤HÁa¼¤¨É¼Öªº¥Í¬¡¤è¦¡¡A¬ðÅã¤@¤E¤C¡³¦~¥N¶Ç²Îªº»ù­ÈÆ[¤w¿ºµMµL¦s¡C¡mù³Ç±Ð±Âªºª©¥»¡n¡]Roger's Version¡A1986¦~¡^«h¦³·N¼Ò¥é¬ü°ê§@®a¯Ç¼»¥§º¸¡EÀN®á¡]Nathaniel Hawthorne¡A1804¡ã1864¦~¡^¤p»¡¡m¬õ¦r¡n¡]The Scarlet Letter¡^¤¤¤Hª«©Ê®æ¥H¤Î¯«¾Çªº±´°Q¡A¾¬±æ³z¹L¹q¸£µ{¦¡¨Ó²z¸Ñ¤W«Ò¦s¦bªº¥i¯à©Ê¡C

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References
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“John Updike,” in Contemporary Authors Online. (A profile of the author's life and works)

“John Updike,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 218: American Short-Story Writers Since World War II, Second Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Patrick Meanor, State University of New York at Oneonta, and Gwen Crane, State University of New York at Oneonta. Gale Group, 1999, pp. 311-335.

“John Updike,” in Contemporary Literary Criticism-Select. (A brief review of the author's life, works, and critical reception)

“John Updike,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 2: American Novelists Since World War II, First Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Jeffrey Helterman, University of South Carolina and Richard Layman, Columbia, South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1978, pp. 484-491.

“John Updike,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 143: American Novelists Since World War II, Third Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. The Gale Group, 1994, pp. 250-276.

“John Updike,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets Since World War II, First Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Donald J. Greiner, University of South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1980, pp. 327-334.

“John Updike,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 227: American Novelists Since World War II, Sixth Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by James H. Giles, Northern Illinois University and Wanda R. Giles, Northern Illinois University. The Gale Group, 2000, pp. 295-323.

“John Updike” in American Writers

“John Updike,” in Contemporary Literary Criticism-Select. (A brief review of the author's life, works, and critical reception)

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John Updike
1932-
American novelist and poet
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 Early Life
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¡@ John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Wesley R. Updike, a high-school mathematics teacher, and Linda Grace Hoyer, a writer. In 1945, his family moved to a large farm outside of town in Shillington, a smaller city near Reading. Updike’s childhood was shadowed by psoriasis and stammering, but his mother encouraged him to write. Escaping to the world of mystery novels, he consumed books by Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr.

In 1950, Updike received a scholarship to study at Harvard University where he studied art and edited the Harvard Lampoon, the world’s oldest humor magazine. He started as a cartoonist, but then shifted to poetry and prose. In 1953, Updike married Mary Pennington, the daughter of a minister of the First Unitarian Church. In 1954, he graduated with a B.A. in English and a year later received a Knox Fellowship to attend the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England.

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 Literary Career: The New Yorkere
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¡@ After a year in England, Updike returned to America, having been offered a job writing for the “Talk of the Town” section at The New Yorker; this magazine published his first short story “Friends from Philadelphia” in 1954. Updike wrote editorials, poetry, stories and criticism for the magazine until 1957, when he moved with his family to Ipswich, Massachusetts, to pursue writing full-time. From the age of 23, Updike supported himself by writing. He moved to Ipswich where he lived for seventeen years. The small town became the model for Tarbox in his novel Couples (1968). The portrait of sexual passion among a group of young suburban married couples was criticized as merely an “uptown Peyton Place.” In 1958, Updike made his debut as a poet with the volume The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures. Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), was about the residents of an old people's home. Basically Updike was trying to write a novel, as he once confessed, “which would serve, in its breadth, as a base for further novels.”

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 Rabbit Tetralogy
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¡@ Critics view Rabbit, Run (1960) as Updike’s literary breakthrough, marking the first of four novels—including Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981)and Rabbit at Rest (1990)—which detail the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. The first book about Updike’s famous hero, Harry Angstrom, the natural athlete, a sexually magnetic, blue-eyed Swede, ended with the verb “Runs.” Updike wrote the book in the present tense, giving it a sort of cinematic quality. In Rabbit, Redux—Redux is Latin for brought back—Harry is a middle-aged bourgeois, who finds his life shattered by the infidelity of his wife. Updike leaves the reader with a question—O.K.? The last word in Rabbit Is Rich was ‘His.’ Rabbit at Rest, set in the late 1980s, paralleled the decay of society, AIDS-plagued America, and Rabbit's swollen body, his chest pains and his feeling that there is “nothing under you but black space...” Tracing Rabbit’s experiences as a high-school basketball star on through marriage, frequent infidelities, financial prosperity, and his death in the 1980s, Updike's tetralogy chronicles four decades of postwar American social history. The novella Rabbit Remembered, from the short fiction collection Licks of Love (2000), serves as an epilogue in which Rabbit's surviving family gathers for an emotionally volatile Thanksgiving dinner.

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 Other Works
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¡@ The Centaur (1963) used a mythological framework to explore the relationship of a schoolmaster father and his son. Winner of the National Book Award for fiction, The Centaur consists of a middle-aged painter’s memories of his father coupled with an adaptation of the mythical story of Chiron, the centaur beloved by Zeus. The painter imagines his father as a modern-day Chiron, nobly enduring his fate in an indifferent world. Couples (1968) is one of Updike’s most popular and controversial examinations of the sexual indiscretions, a prevalent theme throughout his work. Marry Me (1976) illuminates themes of spousal incompatibility and betrayal in the adulterous love story of Jerry and Sally. This novel is notable for the complex system of metaphors, allusions and imagery used to represent the protagonist’s fluctuating mental health. The Coup (1979) was an exotic first-person narration by an ex-dictator of a fictitious African state.

In 1970, Updike introduced another noted recurring character, Henry Bech. The short stories in Bech (1970) follow the life of the Jewish-American author as he endures the rigors of literary celebrity and the fickle nature of the academic world. Bech is Back (1982) and Bech at Bay (1998) follow the character’s career up through his anti-climactic Nobel Prize award ceremony. Too Far to Go (1979), another collection of stories, focuses on an alcoholic couple named Richard and Joan Maple whose infidelities and hedonistic lifestyle highlight the breakdown of traditional values in the 1970s. Borrowing from the characterizations and theological considerations of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Roger's Version (1986) ponders the possibility of understanding God via computer programming.

In 2000 appeared Updike’s prequel Gertrude and Claudius to Hamlet, in which the moody prince is not the central character but the story focuses on his mother Queen Gertrude, her husband, and Claudius, her husband’s younger brother. Updike received Pulitzer Prize for The Early Stories: 1953-1975 (2003). Presented in one volume for the first time, these stories trace the progression of American culture over twenty years as well as Updike’s thematic and stylistic development. Terrorist (2006), Updike's 22nd novel, was about an 18-year-old Islamic extremist, whose critique of American culture is literally deadly.

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 Critical Reception
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¡@ Updike has lived in New England, where most of his fiction is set, and in Massachusetts, about twenty miles from Boston. Critics widely view his work as a commentary on the moral and social fabric of American life. Updike is a gentle satirist, poking fun at American life and customs, without any mean-spirited nihilism. He observes the ordinary life, and frequently asks the reader to recognize and reconsider preconceptions. In “The Bankrupt Man” (1983), Updike turns upside-down the common views of a bankrupt and proves that there is an afterlife: “The bankrupt man buys himself a motorcycle.

Updike called sex, art and religion “the three great secret things” in human experience. His recurring use of graphic sexuality has been praised by some reviewers as an honest celebration of human desire, but condemned by others as merely pornographic. Moreover, several critics have characterized Updike’s portrayal of women as exploitative and misogynistic. Despite such controversial subject matter, Updike is considered by many scholars as an author who often focuses on Christian mores, and his novels and stories are frequently lauded for their steadfast examination of modern man's spiritual condition. Existential questions have been in the center of Updike’s work from the beginning of his career. He has also read theologians for guidance and regularly attended church for worship.

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References
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“John Updike,” in Contemporary Authors Online. (A profile of the author's life and works)

“John Updike,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 218: American Short-Story Writers Since World War II, Second Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Patrick Meanor, State University of New York at Oneonta, and Gwen Crane, State University of New York at Oneonta. Gale Group, 1999, pp. 311-335.

“John Updike,” in Contemporary Literary Criticism-Select. (A brief review of the author's life, works, and critical reception)

“John Updike,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 2: American Novelists Since World War II, First Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Jeffrey Helterman, University of South Carolina and Richard Layman, Columbia, South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1978, pp. 484-491.

“John Updike,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 143: American Novelists Since World War II, Third Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. The Gale Group, 1994, pp. 250-276.

“John Updike,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets Since World War II, First Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Donald J. Greiner, University of South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1980, pp. 327-334.

“John Updike,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 227: American Novelists Since World War II, Sixth Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by James H. Giles, Northern Illinois University and Wanda R. Giles, Northern Illinois University. The Gale Group, 2000, pp. 295-323.

“John Updike” in American Writers

“John Updike,” in Contemporary Literary Criticism-Select. (A brief review of the author's life, works, and critical reception)

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