Pulitizer winner John Updike dies

John Updike, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction whose novels and short stories exposed an undercurrent of ambivalence and disappointment in small-town, middle-class America, died Tuesday. He was 76.

Updike’s death from lung cancer was announced by Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher. Updike was a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., but the announcement did not indicate where he died.

Updike published more than 50 books, more than 20 of them novels, and countless short stories, as well as collections of poetry. In recent years, he was best known for his art criticism and essays. His last published piece was a review of Toni Morrison’s novel “A Mercy” in the Nov. 3 issue of the New Yorker.

“He had a remarkably wide range of literary interests that was never in my view superficial or casual,” Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, said Tuesday. The New York Review of Books published many of Updike’s reviews.

Updike’s literary criticism, Silvers noted, covered nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some 19th-century authors.

Two of Updike’s most memorable fictional characters, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom and Henry Bech, became emblems of the displaced American male that fascinated him as a writer. Angstrom, a man he often referred to as his alter-ego, is the disenchanted middle-class drifter in Updike’s four-book series about “Rabbit.” Bech is the Jewish American novelist, breaking away from his cultural roots and immigrant heritage to become a fully assimilated American. Each in his own way reflects Updike’s major themes.

Early in his career, Updike said he wrote most often about the world he came from, “the American Protestant small-town middle class,” as he described it in a 1966 interview with Life magazine. “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”

Updike was still in his 20s when his second novel, “Rabbit Run,” brought him national attention in 1960.

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was a small-town Pennsylvania boy who grew into a high school basketball star. He married young, quickly found adult life disappointing, left his wife and young son and set off alone.

Three more novels about Angstrom followed: “Rabbit Redux” in 1971, “Rabbit Is Rich” in 1981 and “Rabbit at Rest” in 1990. The last two in the series each won a Pulitzer, and “Rabbit Is Rich” won the American Book Award and National Book Award. As Rabbit muddled through the collapse of established sexual mores, the rise of the technological age and the beginnings of globalization, he became a “purposely representative” American male, Updike explained in “Self-Consciousness,” his 1989 memoir. Many critics found “a great divide between Updike’s exquisite command of prose and … the apparent no-good vulgar nothing he expended it on,” wrote critic Eliot Fremont-Smith in a 1981 article for the Village Voice.

Others saw Rabbit’s story as “a subtle expose of the frailty of the American dream,” wrote literary critic Donald J. Greiner, a scholar who wrote extensively about Updike’s work.

Updike said Rabbit was a typical man, weighed down by the pressures and disappointments of adulthood that few men spoke of in his generation.

Starting with his first published collection of short stories, “The Same Door” in 1959, Updike was admired for his “lean and lapidary prose,” critic A.C. Spectorsky wrote in the Saturday Review in 1959.

Most of Updike’s short stories appeared first in the New Yorker, where he was briefly a staff writer and, for decades, a regular contributor.

Updike was successful in his 20 or so stories about Bech, the famous Jewish American novelist who suffers from writer’s block and gets by on his past literary glories.

Updike joked that he invented Bech to grab some of the attention from his major competitors. When he started his Bech stories in 1964, that list included Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, all acclaimed Jewish American writers.

He said that Bech was loosely based on J.D. Salinger, who wrote “Catcher in the Rye,” to blazing praise in 1951 but stopped publishing altogether in 1965. Like Salinger, Bech’s fans kept up their loyal admiration. “Bech: A Book,” in 1970, was followed by “Bech Is Back” in 1982 and “Bech at Bay” in 1998.

Several of Updike’s novels were made into movies. “The Witches of Eastwick,” where realism spins off into fantasy, shows what happens when bored suburban women capable of witchery meet one devilish man.

His torrent of fiction never seemed to slow Updike’s output of essays and book reviews. Updike was 29, still a fairly new name among New Yorker writers, when he reviewed “Franny and Zooey” by Salinger, who was by then a legendary contributor to the magazine.

Updike’s 1961 review for The New York Times was blunt and precise and has since been included in several critical anthologies.

He married Mary Pennington in 1953, the year before he graduated from college. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1976. A year later, he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard. She had three children from a previous marriage.

Survivors include his wife and stepchildren; four children from his first marriage, sons David and Michael and daughters Miranda and Elizabeth Cobblah; and several grandchildren.

Novels

“The Poorhouse Fair,” 1959

“Rabbit, Run,” 1960

“The Centaur,” 1963.

“Of the Farm,” 1965.

“Couples,” 1968.

“Bech, a Book,” 1970.

“Rabbit, Redux, 1971.

“A Month of Sundays,” 1975.

“Marry Me,” 1977.

“The Coup,” 1978.

“Rabbit is Rich,” 1981.