Rabbit author John Updike dies · 2009-01-29 13:06
One of America's best known writers, John Updike, died on Tuesday at the age of 76. His stories, poems, essays and novels have been widely read and admired around the world.
In a literary career that spanned more than half a century, Updike won many American prizes for literature, including two Pulitzers, the National Book Award and three National Book Critics' Circle awards. His first published work, a collection of poems called The Carpentered Hen, appeared in 1958.
Ultimately, Updike published more than 25 novels and a dozen short story collections. Most of his stories first appeared in the New Yorker Magazine, which carried his byline 862 times, Voice of America informs.
But Robert B. Silvers, his longtime editor at the New York Review of Books, says he will be best remembered for his series of novels about the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a fictional middle-class car dealer in a small Pennsylvania town similar to the one he himself grew up in.
Of his many well-received novels, one of Updike's own favorites was The Centaur, a contemporary father-son conflict set within the framework of Greek mythology. It won the National Book Award in 1963.
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