Susan’s Almanac Project for March 18, 2020

Hello, everyone! Are you all okay out there and practicing social distancing? Stay well; we can do this!
I’m hoping to do more original posts very soon, but this is a re-post from last year on one of the U.S.’s most prominent authors ever. If you’re an Updike hater, feel free to take a pass.

It’s the birthday of one of the giants of American literature, John Updike (1932-2009), who wrote 61 books and is best known for his novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a has-been high school basketball star trapped in an ordinary, small-town life: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990), the last two of which won Pulitzers.

Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, an only child, and grew up in nearby Shillington until his family moved to a farm when he was 13. He worked as a copyboy for a local paper in the summers, and his first dream was to be an animator or cartoonist, an interest he continued to pursue as an English major at Harvard. In 1953 he married a Radcliffe student, Mary Entwistle Pennington, and the next year graduated summa cum laud. Updike and his wife eventually had four children together (but don’t get fond of Mary: have you read any of Updike’s work?), the first of which was born in England while Updike was at Oxford on an art fellowship. That same year he had work accepted by The New Yorker for the first time, and when they returned to the U.S., Updike started working for The New Yorker.

Updike hated living in New York City, however, and moved his family to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he got a great deal of important writing done, including one of his most famous short stories, “A & P,” which I’m sure we’ve all read in high school anthologies and which has such vulnerability and heart that I want to drop everything and reread it right now but I’d have to hunt it down… Hey, here’s a link! http://www.tiger-town.com/whatnot/updike/ You’re welcome.

Updike published his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, in 1959. His third novel, The Centaur (1963), won a National Book Award. Rabbit Is Rich also won a National Book Award; the Rabbit novels famously portray their main character’s life against the backdrop of 20th century American experience and have been considered by some to be, collectively, the great American novel. (Scootch over, Moby Dick.) Updike once said in an interview, “My subject is the American Protestant small town middle class. I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”

Updike and his first wife divorced in 1976 and the next year Updike remarried; he and his second wife, Martha Ruggles Bernard, were married for more than thirty years until Updike’s death from lung cancer at 76.

Super Fun Fact: Only three authors have won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction twice: Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and John Updike. Super Fun Extra Bonus Fact: Updike never won the Nobel Prize, but his character Henry Bech does, in Bech at Bay (1998).

Stay well and stay home on this partly cloudy Wednesday, uplift one another as able from a distance, and stay scrupulously honest to the data, the best of which is probably coming from the CDC.