John Updike

John Updike, one of America’s most accomplished novelists, died of lung cancer today. He was seventy-six. His writing career spanned more than fifty years, during which he produced over twenty novels, as well as highly regarded collections of short fiction, essays, memoir and poetry. A writer of astonishing discipline and quality, Updike’s best work reflects the changing mores of America in the second half of the twentieth century, a country that shifted, expanded and re-invented itself, much like the author’s own prose. Envied and adulated by other writers (but impossible to successfully imitate), he won every major literary award, with the exception of the Nobel Prize. He was also an early contributor to Granta.

Perhaps no other contemporary American writer was as concerned about the tensions between men and women; about the dangers and delights of desire; about sex and its consequences; about small-town childhood and restless adolescence; about the pleasures and pains of suburban existence. Updike’s second novel, Rabbit, Run (1960), is a worthwhile companion to Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961). Rabbit, Run is the first in Updike’s Rabbit quartet, which follows the journey of an aging American everyman, cast adrift in a country that he barely recognises but marching ever onwards. The Rabbit novels are an extraordinary accomplishment: grandly ambitious in scope (each novel is bigger and busier than the one before) but also poignant and precise, open to sensation and intelligently alive. Updike’s early training as an artist at Oxford University can be felt in his prose, in his attention to detail, his quick eye, his feel for texture and colour and shadow and mood. His writing delineates and distils not only the expansive, important moments in life but also the ordinary, uneventful ones, which are far more plentiful. Or, as Updike described this element of his craft, ‘to give the mundane its beautiful due’. But there was nothing mundane about Updike’s prose – bustling, buoyant, erotic, playful, watchful, original and intense – which, at its best, was better than almost anyone’s.

Read obituaries from the Associated Press, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, UPI, the London Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent, the Scotsman, the BBC, ITN, CNN and Sky News.

Read tributes from Adam Gopnik, John Irving, Michiko Kakutani, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Martin Amis, Jay Parini, Boyd Tonkin, Todd Gitlin, William Boyd, Lev Grossman, Tom Leonard, Erica Wagner, David L. Ulin, Malcolm Jones, David Baddiel, Christopher Tayler, Robert Fulford, Brooke Allen, Joseph Rago, John Mark Eberhart, Mick Brown, Xan Brooks and Troy Patterson.

Read an appraisal by John Freeman, Granta’s US editor.

Watch Updike’s recent video interview with Sam Tanenhaus, for the New York Times.

Watch John Updike being interviewed by Charlie Rose.

Read Updike’s Featured Author page at the New York Times.

Listen to an interview with Updike on BBC’s Radio 4.

Listen to New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers (incorrectly identified by the presenter as ‘Robert Summers’) discuss Updike with the BBC.

Listen to novelists Philip Hensher and John Banville discuss Updike’s ‘untranslatable’ genius on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Watch Ian McEwan tell BBC Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman about his late friendship with Updike and how a love of the writer’s work brought he and his wife together.

Watch Newsnight’s Stephen Smith reflect upon Updike’s life and books.

The BBC and Guardian recount tributes to Updike by other writers.