"John Updike had the mind of a middling middle-class postwar American male, and the prose style of a literary genius. Such a lord of language was he that even the notoriously grudging Vladimir Nabokov afforded him a meed of praise. A reviewer, musing on the disproportion between the style and content of Updike's fiction, likened him to a lobster with one hugely overgrown claw."
"As a novelist he aimed, as he once put it, to give the mundane its beautiful due. Apart from a few rare and in some cases ill-advised ventures into the exotic the court at Elsinore, Africa, the future his abiding subject was the quotidian life of ordinary Americans in the decades between the end of the second world war and the coming of a new technological age."
"He was born in 1932 in Pennsylvania, living for 13 years in Shillington before he moved with his parents and grandparents into a farmhouse in a rural redoubt called, aptly, Plowville. He was an only child, and he loved and cared for his father and, in particular, his mother, until the end of their days. Updike senior was a high school maths teacher who, in the Depression years, supplemented the family income by working as a road labourer."
John Updike combined the sensibilities of a middling middle-class postwar American male with extraordinary prose craftsmanship. He received praise even from notoriously grudging peers such as Vladimir Nabokov and faced criticism comparing his style-content imbalance to a lobster with one oversized claw. He could be prickly despite outward bland urbanity. His fiction primarily honored quotidian American life between World War II and late 20th-century technological change, with occasional misadventures into exotic settings. He was born in 1932 in Pennsylvania, raised in Shillington and Plowville, cherished his parents, and attended Harvard on an English scholarship while writing prolifically to his mother and community.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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