John Updike
The postwar American literary scene produced a generation of writers who worked across multiple forms, blending fiction, criticism, and poetry within a single career. John Updike, born on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pennsylvania, became one of the most productive and versatile figures to emerge from that period, working in English throughout his life as a novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist, art critic, and literary critic.
Updike was educated at Governor Mifflin Senior High School, Harvard College, and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, a combination that positioned him at the intersection of literary and visual culture. His work as an art critic sat alongside his fiction and poetry, giving his output an unusually broad range across forms and disciplines. As a novelist and short-story writer, he contributed prose narratives to American literature, while his roles as both art critic and literary critic extended his presence into the evaluative and analytical dimensions of cultural life. He was a citizen of the United States and wrote throughout his career in the English language.
Updike's work received substantial recognition from major American literary institutions. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, an accumulation of honors that placed him among the more decorated American prose writers of his era. He died on January 27, 2009, in Danvers, Massachusetts, having worked across fiction, poetry, and criticism for several decades.
Quotes by John Updike
John Updike's insights on:
J.D. Salinger wrote a masterpiece, The Catcher in the Rye, recommending that readers who enjoy a book call up the author; then he spent his next twenty years avoiding the telephone.
Upon shaving off one's beard. The scissors cut the long-grown hair; the razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, bug-eyed, I stare at the forgotten boy I was.
No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.
But cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
Vegas must be a great town for Laundromats. Nobody lives there, everybody is just passing through, leaving a little bit of dirt.
Relieved after things have been put right..Similes Dictionary like they lifted a concrete block out of my belly.
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and earning money.
When you look into a mirror rorrim a otni kool uoy nehWit is not yourself you see ees uoy esruoy ton si tibut a kind of apish error rorre hsipa fo dnik a tubposed in fearful symmetry yrtemmys lufraef ni desop