Type                   

2nd Lines

07 - 26.92%

Tribal - Ego Gates

Collective - Understanding Channels

 John Updike - Manifestor - Biography

John Hoyer Updike (born March 1932) is an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered).

Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their interrelationships.

 Early life
As a teenager, Updike was encouraged by his mother, who was also a writer, to write while attending High School. Updike and his mother had psoriasis, a skin disease where red patches grew on the surface of the skin. Exposure to the sun helped reduce the red spots, so his mother and Updike were always sun tanning. Updike grew up in a relatively poor family. But lack of money did not stop Updike from entering Harvard University on a full scholarship. He served as president of the Harvard Lampoon, before graduating summa cum laude (he wrote a thesis on George Herbert) in 1954 with a degree in English. He became a regular contributor to The New Yorker. Updike’s skin made him unwilling to take on jobs where you had to be presentable. This helped encourage him to write, where he could hide his self consciousness in his novels. After Harvard, however he decided to pursue a career in graphic arts. Updike went to The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts, in Oxford. At Oxford, Udpike realized that he had no interest in painting or scuplting.

The idea of writing as a career presented itself. Updike’s psoriasis caused him insecurity about his body. The red patches would come and go making it hard to live with them. Exposure to the sun helped reduce the red spots, but they eventually would reappear. Whereever Updike went, he stayed close to beaches, and other places where he had good exposure to the sun. In 1957, Updike left Manhattan and moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, which served as the model for the fictional New England town of Tarbox in his 1968 novel, Couples. In 1959 he published a well-regarded collection of short stories, The Same Door, which included both "Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?" and "A Trillion Feet of Gas." Other classic stories include "A&P," "Pigeon Feathers," "The Alligators," and "Museums and Women." His 1960 New Yorker essay "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," about Boston baseball legend Ted Williams' last game, is regarded as being among the best examples of sports writing. Updike's aliments, including stuttering, helped create serveral of his most famous books. The Centaur, in 1960, describes a story showing the relationship between a school teacher and his son who has psoriasis. This story parallels the same relationship that Updike had with his father, while at the same time struggling with psoriasis. The Centaur won the National Book Award in 1964. One of Updike’s short stories, From the Journal of a Leper, describes a man struggling with psoriasis much like that of John Updike’s life. Stuttering made Updike feel insecure about speeches. Updike describes his stuttering in Self Consciousness, as trying carefully to complete a speech, and stuttering at the last second unable to get the words out. The only times that Updike felt comfortable were places where he had already stuttered before.

He favors realism and naturalism in his writing; for instance, the opening of Rabbit, Run spans several pages describing a pick-up basketball game in intricate detail. His writing typically focuses on relationships among people: friends, married couples, or those in extramarital affairs. Updike's father played football in college, and the Rabbit series shows the life of a great athlete, and eventually his decline. After football, Updike's father went on to teach high school mathematics, which lead to Updike's childhood in a poor family. Couples and the Rabbit tetralogy, in particular, follow this pattern. In the Rabbit books, the changing social, political, and economic history of America forms the background to the Angstroms' marriage and acts occasionally as a commentary on it - and vice versa.

On occasion, Updike abandons former settings, examples such as The Witches of Eastwick (1984, later made into a movie of the same name); The Coup (novel) (1978, about a fictional Cold War-era African dictatorship), and in his 2000 postmodern novel Gertrude and Claudius (a prelude to the story of Hamlet). Other important novels include The Centaur (National Book Award, 1963), Couples (1968) and Roger's Version (1986). In addition to Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, a recurrent Updike alter-ego is the moderately well-known, unprolific Jewish novelist Henry Bech who is chronicled in three comic short story cycles, Bech: A Book (1970), Bech is Back (1981) and Bech At Bay: A Quasi-Novel (1998). His stories involving the socially-conscious (and social-climbing) couple "The Maples" are widely considered to be autobiographical, and several were the basis for a television movie entitled Too Far To Go starring Michael Moriarty and Blythe Danner which was broadcast on NBC. Updike stated that he chose this surname for the characters because he admired the beauty and resilience of the tree.

While Updike has continued to publish at the rate of about a book a year, critical opinion on his work since the early nineties has been generally muted, and sometimes damning. Nevertheless, his novelistic scope in recent years has been wide: retellings of mythical stories (Tristan and Isolde in Brazil, 1994; a Hamlet prequel in Gertrude and Claudius, 2000), generational saga (In the Beauty of the Lilies, 1996) and science fiction (Toward the end of time, 1997). In Seek My Face (2002) he explored the post-war art scene; in Villages (2004), Updike returns to the familiar territory of infidelities in New England. His twenty-second novel, Terrorist, the story of a fervent, eighteen-year-old Muslim in New Jersey, was published in June 2006.

A large anthology of short stories from his literary career, titled The Early Stories 1953–1975 (2003) won the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He wrote that his intention with the form was to "give the mundane its beautiful due."

Updike is a well-known and practicing critic (Assorted Prose 1965, Picked-Up Pieces 1975, Hugging the Shore 1983, Odd Jobs 1991, More Matter 1999), and is often in the center of critical wars of words. In retaliation for Updike's review of Tom Wolfe's novel A Man In Full, Wolfe called him one of "my Three Stooges" (the other two were John Irving and Norman Mailer). Updike has also been involved in critical disputes with Gore Vidal and John Gardner, authors renowned for their criticism of him and others.

Updike has worked in a wide array of sports genres, including fiction, poetry, essay, and memoir. His lone foray into drama, Buchanan Dying: a play, apparently constituted something of a reversal, since in a 1968 interview Updike claimed that "he unreality of painted people standing on a platform saying things they've said to each other for months is more than I can overlook." He further said: "From Twain to James and Faulkner to Bellow, the history of novelists as playwrights is a sad one."

In 2006 Updike was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement in that genre.

Updike has four children and currently lives in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts with his second wife, Martha. His new book is a collection of essays on art, Still Looking (Knopf, 2005). In his memoir,Self Consciousness, Updike writes a letter to his Grandsons Anoff and Kwame, about the Updike family history, and for them not to be ashamed of their skin. His Grandsons are half black, their father being from West Africa. Updike doesn't want them to go through life being ashamed of their skin and to not let their talent go to waste.

Updike was the subject of a so-called "closed book examination" by Nicholson Baker, entitled U and I (Random House, 1991).

In an episode of the animated television series The Simpsons ,entitled "Insane Clown Poppy", John Updike is the author of a book that Krusty the clown is promoting. The book's title is "YOUR SHOES TOO BIG TO KICKBOX GOD" which is a 20 page book written by John Updike as a scam for Krusty the Clown to make money.

 Quotations
Dreams come true; without that possibility nature would not intice us to have them.
The great thing about the dead, they make space. (Rabbit is Rich)
loves men, uncomplaining with their bellies and cross-hatched red necks, embarrassed for what to talk about when the game is over, whatever the game is. What a threadbare thing we make of life! Yet what a marvelous thing the mind is, they can't make a machine like it; and the body can do a thousand things there isn't a factory in the world can duplicate the motion. (Rabbit is Rich)
Tell your mother, if she asks, that maybe we'll meet some other time. Under the pear trees, in Paradise. (Rabbit at Rest)
Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. (The Witches of Eastwick)
We all dream, and we all stand aghast at the mouth of the caves of our deaths; and this is our way in. Into the nether world. (The Witches of Eastwick)
We wake at different times, and the gallantest flowers are those that bloom in the cold. (The Witches of Eastwick)
An Irish temper makes you appreciate Lutherans.(Terrorist)
Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. ("Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," The New Yorker, 1960)
Gods do not answer letters. ("Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," The New Yorker, 1960)
My mother had dreams of being a writer and I used to see her type in the front room. The front room is also where I would go when I was sick so I would sit there and watch her.(2004 interview with Academy of Achievement (source: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/upd0int-1))
Black is a shade of brown. So is white, if you look. (Brazil)
Standing with her in the warming waterfall, soaping her skin so its yielding silk was overlaid with a white grease, and then letting her soap him in turn, he felt his cashew become a banana, and then a rippled yam, bursting with weight. (Brazil)
Freedom is a blanket which, pulled up to the chin, uncovers the feet. (The Coup)
Fame is a mask that eats into the face. (Self-Consciousness)
Masturbation! Thou saving grace note upon the baffled chord of self. (A Month of Sundays)

 Literary works

Rabbit novels
(1960) Rabbit, Run
(1971) Rabbit Redux
(1981) Rabbit Is Rich
(1990) Rabbit At Rest
(2001) Rabbit Remembered (a novella in the short story collection Licks of Love)

Bech books
(1970) Bech, a Book
(1982) Bech Is Back
(1998) Bech at Bay

Buchanan books
(1974) Buchanan Dying (a play)
(1992) Memories of the Ford Administration (a novel)

Other novels
(1959) The Poorhouse Fair
(1963) The Centaur
(1965) Of The Farm
(1968) Couples
(1975) A Month Of Sundays
(1977) Marry Me (A Romance)
(1978) The Coup
(1984) The Witches of Eastwick
(1986) Roger's Version
(1988) S.
(1994) Brazil
(1996) In the Beauty of the Lilies
(1997) Toward the End of Time
(2000) Gertrude and Claudius
(2002) Seek My Face
(2004) Villages
(2006) Terrorist

Short story collections
(1959) The Same Door
(1962) Pigeon Feathers
(1962) A&P
(1964) Olinger Stories (a selection)
(1966) The Music School
(1972) Museums And Women
(1979) Problems
(1979) Too Far To Go (related short stories about a single family)
(1987) Trust Me
(1994) The Afterlife
(2000) The Best American Short Stories of the Century (editor)
(2001) Licks of Love
(2003) The Early Stories: 1953-1975

Poetry
(1958) Ex-Basketball Player
(1958) The Carpentered Hen
(1963) Telephone Poles
(1969) Midpoint
(1977) Tossing and Turning
(1985) Facing Nature
(1993) Collected Poems 1953-1993
(2001) Americana: and Other Poems

Non-fiction, essays and criticism
(1965) Assorted Prose
(1975) Picked-Up Pieces
(1983) Hugging The Shore
(1989) Self-Consciousness: Memoirs
(1989) Just Looking
(1991) Odd Jobs
(1993) The Disposable Rocket
(1996) Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf
(1999) More Matter
(2005) Still Looking: Essays on American Art
(2007) Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism

Children's books
(1962) The Magic Flute
(1964) The Ring
(1965) A Child's Calendar
(1969) Bottom's Dream
(1995) A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects
(2006) The Twelve Terrors of Christmas

Source : Some of the information on this page came from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.