John Updike

Gertrude and Claudius is a novel by John Updike. It uses the known sources of Shakespeare's Hamlet to tell a story that draws on a rather straightforward revenge tale in the medieval Denmark depicted by Saxo Grammaticus in his twelfth-century Historiae Danicae, but incorporates extra plot elements added by François de …

Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between …

A collection both intimate and generous of the eloquent, insightful, beautifully written prose works that John Updike was compiling when he died in January 2009.This collection of miscellaneous prose opens with a self-portrait of the writer in winter, a Prospero who, though he fears his most dazzling performances are …

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD “Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea,” writes John Updike in his Foreword to this collection of literary considerations. But the sailor doth protest too much: This collection begins somewhere near deep …