eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Literary Reference Center Collection Includes bibliographical references and index. Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on April 13, 2018).

Article Abstract: A close look at the extraordinary literary achievements of this popular and prolific American author. -- Provided by publisher. Writer John Updike (1932-2009) traced the high point and fall of midcentury American self-confidence and energy. A stylist with sixty books to his credit, he rendered the physical surfaces of the nation's life even as he revealed the intense longings beneath those surfaces. This book explores Updike's most significant works of fiction, templates through which his entire oeuvre may be understood. A small-town Pennsylvanian whose talent took him to Harvard, a staff position at the New Yorker, and ultimately a life in suburban Massachusetts, where the pace of his literary output never slowed, Updike was very much in the American cultural tradition. His series of Rabbit Angstrom novels strongly echo Sinclair Lewis's earlier explorations of middle America, while The Witches of Eastwick and related novels are variations on Nathaniel Hawthorne's nineteenth-century classic The Scarlet Letter. His best seller Couples examines what Time magazine called "the adulterous society" in the last year of the Kennedy administration, following the nation's fall from idealism into self-centeredness. This outline of Updike's professional career highlights his importance in the life of the nation--not only as a novelist but also as a gifted essayist, reviewer, cultural critic, and poet -- Provided by publisher.